Infrastructure is quietly heroic, and deserves to be seen that way.

Captured with the Rodenstock 40mm/4.0 HR-Digaron-W lens (@ f/6.3), Phase One IQ4-150 back (@ ISO 50), Cambo 1250 Camera.

This humble, somewhat dilapidated shelter, a few miles south of SFO airport, once housed a medium wave aviation beacon (NDB). It currently hosts a variety of aviation surveillance sensors. Its location is also waypoint on the way to SFO runway 28R.

This kind of infrastructure, integral to modern aviation safety, is almost invisible if you don’t know where to look for it.

Now officially known as the “William H. Grey III 30th Street Station” (but no one calls it that), Philadelphia’s main rail station is a neoclassical gem. Located just across the river from Center City in West Philadelphia, it serves Amtrak, SEPTA, and a few NJ Transit trains. The modernist glass Cira Center office complex next door is a striking contrast.

Captured with a Hasselblad (Zeiss) T* CFE FLE 40mm/4 lens (@ f/8) lens, Pentax 645z camera (@ ISO 100).

Now officially known as the “William H. Grey III 30th Street Station” (but no one calls it that, Philadelphia’s main rail station is a neoclassical gem. Located just across the river from Center City in West Philadelphia, it serves Amtrak, SEPTA, and a few NJ Transit trains. The modernist glass Cira Center office complex next door is a striking contrast.

Captured with a Hasselblad (Zeiss) T* CFE FLE 40mm/4 lens (@ f/8) lens, Pentax 645z camera (@ ISO 100).

@cschrader@jawns.club I’ve not seen it recently - definitely on the list next time I’m up that way. Thanks

@cstross@wandering.shop Added to the list! Thanks.

In any case, if you’ve made it this far, let me strongly recommend the work of Hilla and Bernd Becher. https://fraenkelgallery.com/artists/bernd-and-hilla-becher

Arguably, give 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.

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.

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.

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.

This was a three second exposure (with about 10 stops of neutral density). The sun was behind the clouds and just above the center of the frame; the lens required careful flagging to avoid glare.

The rendering of water, especially in the sea, differs greatly with exposure. 30 seconds looks quite different from 3 seconds, which is just as different from 1/30 sec, which is different from 1/1000 sec. About 1/30 sec renders roughly the way our vision does; anything else requires a camera to see.

@kevbob@xoxo.zone You weren’t that far off - the public safety tower is on the same hill.

With a few exceptions (mostly towers atop downtown switching offices in populated areas), no one was trying to make any of this utilitarian communications infrastructure beautiful. It was form strictly following function, built to be reliable and rugged.

But there was, I think, quite a bit of beauty to find in it. I wonder if we’ll look at our current neighborhood cellular towers, now often regarded as a visual blight, the same way decades after they’re (inevitably) also gone.

The San Jose Oak Hill Tower is unique in a number of ways. The concrete brutalist design appears not to have been replicated anywhere else; it seems to have been site-specific. It sits atop an underground switching center (that was partly used for a military contract), which explains the relatively hardened design.

Today the underground switch is still there, owned by AT&T, but the tower space is leased to land mobile and cellular providers. The old horn antennas at top are disconnected.

For much of the 20th century, the backbone of the AT&T “Long Lines” long distance telephone network consisted primarily of terrestrial microwave links (rather than copper or fiber cables). Towers with distinctive KS-15676 “horn” antennas could be seen on hilltops and atop switching center buildings across the US; they were simply part of the American landscape.

Most of the relay towers were simple steel structures. This brutalist concrete platform in San Jose was, I believe, of a unique design.

Captured with the Rodenstock 50mm/4.0 HR Digaron-W lens (@ f/4.5) on a Cambo WRS-1600 camera (with about 15mm of vertical shift to preserve the geometry), the Phase One IQ4-150 back (@ ISO 50) in dual exposure mode (which preserves a couple stops of additional dynamic range into the shadows).

The tower’s shape is irregular; it tapers slightly.

The wide angle and panoramic orientation give a bit of context, alone on a hill (which is being rapidly encroached by adjacent residential development).

@Lyle@cville.online Central Park is truly a gem.

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

A six second exposure created a motion study; we can see how people move around the plaza. Or perhaps they’re ghosts.

Compositionally, this is mostly a study of circles and rings, with an imaginary diagonal radiating from the fountain to the man with the camera in the lower right.

The skyscrapers along Park Avenue in the 40’s and lower 50’s are all minor engineering marvels. They’re built atop the rail yard for Grand Central Terminal (an early adopter of the modern real estate concept of “air rights”). Many of the newer buildings are much taller than was anticipated when the terminal was constructed more than a century ago. This heavily constrains their foundations and anchor points, leading to unusual load-bearing designs such as the steelwork shown in the photo.