The Newtown Pentacle

Tuesday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The Rivers of Steel outfit, over in Pittsburgh’s Swissvale section, recently announced a couple of opportunities to visit the Carrie Furnace site for participating in a ‘photo safari.’ It cost me $35 to gain entry to this event, which I gladly forked over.

A quick half hour drive from HQ ensued, early on a Sunday morning, and soon I was wearing a hard hat and entering the property lines of a former steel mill, located on the northern bank of the Monongahela River.

The place is a literal ruin, and there’s several safety requirements that attendees are required to oblige. None of these rules are onerous, I’d mention, especially as compared to various industrial sites which I’ve visited over the years – like the Sewer Plant in Brooklyn, or SimsMetal in Queens – both of which are found along the fabulous Newtown Creek.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

There’s a still active steel mill just down the river in a community called Braddock, and freight rail servicing the operations were spotted all morning moving just beyond Carrie’s fence lines. That’s CSX #4288 pictured above, heading towards a bridge nearby the Homestead Pump House site, and over the water to the southern bank of the Monongahela.

I’ve been to Carrie Furnace a couple of times now, and have discerned that the vast majority of attendees to these ‘photo safari’s’ seem to cluster around the first thing they see, which is – admittedly – pretty spectacular.

My plan for the morning was to get away from the madding crowd and start where most of them end, moving in a widdershins direction.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

I walked the length of the property, to get to the beginning of the effort, and couldn’t resist a few shots of this crane truck. The Rivers of Steel outfit uses some of the cash from these public events to maintain and preserve the ruins here, large sections of which are in a fairly sorry state and structurally unsound. The crane truck is part of an operation to stabilize things.

My understanding of things is that Carrie was a part of the massive U.S. Steel Homestead mill, once the largest such industrial operation on the planet. The predominant section of the mill was across the river in the community which lent it the name ‘Homestead,’ but operations were spread out all over the place.

Just ask the Rivers of Steel people, they’ll tell you the whole tale of the place; the Empire State Building, and the Brooklyn Bridge, and most of Manhattan and Chicago’s skyscrapers, the rebuild of the Pacific Naval fleet after Pearl Harbor – all were accomplished with metals forged here.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

There’s a long corridor, and it would be vainglory for me to try and describe its purpose, that I haven’t paid much attention to in past visits. I thereby set up the tripod, and got busy.

This is definitely a ‘tripod’ sort of place to shoot, inside a structure with terrific amounts of industrial and architectural detail. The challenge here involves contrast, as it was relatively early in the morning and the light was harsh. At night, it would be a ‘set it and forget it’ sort of thing with long exposures.

Instead I had to rely on following the ‘focus and exposure stacking’ technique, which allowed me to compensate for the contrast.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The Rivers of Steel operation sets out ‘no-go’ areas that are delineated by yellow safety tape and plastic chains. This one (and the shot below) was captured at the perimeter of one of these borders. The reason for the restriction involves the stability of the surrounding structure, which is what the people who operate that crane truck have been brought in to address.

I received a caution from one of the group’s volunteers while capturing these that I had nearly wandered too far.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Since I was shooting in pursuance of stacking the images, I used an F4 aperture at ISO 100 and moved the point of focus around while altering the exposure time. When combined, the multiple images created an aperture equivalent of F24. Exposure times were in the 3-6 second range, but when the image was compiled this added up to about 24-30 seconds of light.

Back tomorrow with more.

“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle

Buy a book!

“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.