Schuylkill Co-Generation Plant and Arsenal Bridge, Philadelphia, 2018.
Industrial-strength pixels at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/42660696454/
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this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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This was captured with the Rodenstock 70mm/5.6 HR Digaron-W lens and the Phase One IQ3-100 back. A bit of vertical shift was used to keep everything straight. A 1/2 sec exposure provided just the right amount of motion blur for the passing train.
The power plant generates electricity (now oil fired, converted from coal) as well as steam for Philly's Center City steam loop. The rail bridge extends the former Pennsylvania Railroad's "High Line" into south Philly's Greenwich rail yard.
I shot several versions of this, with exposures that kept the moving train sharp or blurred it to varying degrees. I think this was the most successful attempt, with the train blurred enough to suggest motion, but not so much that it's unrecognizable.
Depicting motion is sometimes a central part of a still photograph.
Power plants are often regarded as utilitarian eyesores, and are rarely (generally under public pressure) built to look beautiful or interesting, (London's Battersea Power Station was an exception). Generally, like here, any beauty to be found is accidental, a direct consequence of interesting form happening to follow from function.
Arguably, given the health and environmental effects of things like power plants, perhaps they *should* be ugly. But ugliness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
In any case, if you like this kind of stuff, let me strongly recommend the work of Hilla and Bernd Becher. https://fraenkelgallery.com/artists/bernd-and-hilla-becher
@[email protected] The decommissioned smenter in Birmingham AL is a good example.
https://www.slossfurnaces.org/
@[email protected]
I have a section in the book I’m currently writing (about cycling across the US, and how small-scale mobility can help decarbonize the US) where I rode past the original Sinclair refinery in Wyoming and it prompted me to think about how weirdly beautiful are the aesthetics of those huge fossil-fuel-aged plants
a lot of physics and chemistry rendered into sculpture
@[email protected] You call that a chimney? Get on my level :blobcatwinktongue:
@[email protected] as a fan of brutalism, I like power plant design