@cross@discuss.systems Spiral staircase on the roof

Captured with the Rodenstock HR Digiron 90mm/5.6 lens (@ f/8.0), Phase One IQ4-150 digital back (@ ISO 50), Phase One XT camera (@ 1/3 sec).

This is mostly a study in horizontal and diagonal lines. It was cold out there.

@forpeterssake@mastodon.xyz They have smaller departure boards near each track, so it’s not quite so bad, but the seating is definitely too limited.

Still, it’s SUCH A BIG IMPROVEMENT.

Adding the Moynihan Hall was a welcome improvement to Penn Station, but didn’t address the main problem, which is insufficient capacity for the number of trains that run through it. There aren’t enough tracks, the platforms are too narrow, and the tunnels entering and leaving the station have too limited capacity. These more fundamental constraints will be much harder to solve, because the underground area around the station is already heavily crowded.

Moynihan Hall occupies part of what had been New York’s main post office building, a block west of the original Penn Station. It was situated over the tracks, with access to platforms, to facilitate Railway Post Office mail delivery, which was common into the 1970’s. After the post office moved its sorting operations elsewhere, it was relatively straightforward to repurpose it as an extension of the adjacent railroad station, which is why it only took the better part of 50 years.

Many of the design elements of the new hall pay deliberate homage to the original, befittingly grand, Penn Station, including especially the prominently exposed steel beams.

There are no seats in the main hall, though there are smaller ticketed waiting areas to the side, as well as a substantial food court. The lack of a “big board” is deliberate, to discourage crowding in any particular area (there is instead a collection of smaller train status monitors spread throughout the hall).

Captured with the Rodenstock 23mm/5.6 HR-Digaron lens and the Phase One IQ4-150 XT camera. The 23mm Digaron is a sharp wide lens, but doesn’t really have a large enough image circle to support extensive movements (which weren’t required here). Captured from the balcony on the south side of the station.

The Moynihan Train Hall is a recently-opened annex (repurposed from the Post Office) to the otherwise dungeon-like remnants of the old Penn Station, buried under Madison Square Garden since 1963.

Captured with a full-frame mirrorless camera and 21mm lens.

This is mostly a study of lines, particularly the handrail (which provides an anchor for the eye to follow), but also the curved railing at the bottom of the stairs at left. I was attracted to the austere, utilitarian design, yet the curved pipe railing by the tracks has an elegant, art deco look to it.

The top of the stairs was a difficult place to work. A tripod was essential for framing, but people were moving around behind me.

For industrial subjects especially, I usually end up preferring the most straightforward and boring perspective I can find that just lets the subject speak for itself. The masters of this approach were Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose “Basic Forms” work richly repays your attention if you like this kind of stuff. https://www.sfmoma.org/artist/Bernd_and_Hilla_Becher/

(They would have undoubtedly gone for an overcast day to capture Big Allis, but I liked the clouds.)

Known locally as “Big Allis” (after Allis-Chalmers, the manufacturer of the largest of the four generators in the plant), Ravenswood is fired by both natural gas (now the primary fuel) and oil, and also has the capability (never used, as far as I know) to burn coal.

Ravenswood has been linked to a spike in asthma and other respiratory disorders among local residents. There is pressure to decommission the generators and replace them with battery banks to store renewable energy from upstate.

This is a composite of two side-by-side images, each captured with the Rodenstock 50mm/4.0 HR Digaron-W lens (@ f/5.6), shifted left and right +/- 12mm to produce a 205MP 2:1 aspect ratio final image.

The Ravenswood plant, along the East River in Long Island City/Astoria Queens, was built by Con Ed in stages during the early- and mid- 1960’s. When opened, it had capacity for about 20% of the city’s electricity demand, as well as producing co-generated steam for the city’s steam loop.

NYC’s IRT subway, opened in 1904, is powered by a 600 volt DC third rail running alongside the tracks. Power is fed to the system via a number of substations throughout the city, where high voltage AC is converted to the lower voltage DC used by trains.

Until recently, this was done with electromechanical rotary converters (essentially a combination AC motor and DC generator). They are now supplanted by solid state rectifiers, but a few of the original rotary converters remain operational.

Union Square West between 16th and 17th Streets in Manhattan is home to five distinctive and variously historically significant narrow mid-rise buildings.

The quirky Decker Building (2nd from left, at 33 Union Square West) is now chiefly residential with a retail ground floor storefront. From 1967-1973 the building housed Andy Warhol’s “Factory” studio, where, in 1968, he was famously and nearly fatally shot by an irate Valarie Solanas. The neighborhood was more colorful back then.

Captured with the Rodenstock 32mm/4.0 Digaron-W lens (@ f/6.3), Phase One XT IQ4-150 camera. 12mm vertical shift to maintain geometry.

This is a straightforward head-on single point perspective view of the facades of the varied buildings on this block just after sunrise. It took some time to line up the camera to be parallel to the faces of the buildings, once again making architectural photography be something of an exercise in surveying.

Captured on a short hike with a small mirrorless camera, 35mm lens, lightweight tripod, and enough neutral density for a roughly 30 second exposure.

Flowing water is a subject that lends itself to motion studies that reveal what our unaided eye can’t see, controlled by exposure time. At 1/3000 sec, every drop of water freezes in place. At 30 seconds, we see smooth, cloud-like structures that obscure individual perturbations. Only at around 1/30 sec does the camera see what we do.