Archive for January 24th, 2024
Scouting and scuttling
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As often mentioned, a lot of what I’ve been doing on these walks around Pittsburgh in the last year has involved scouting photo locations for future exploitation. It’s my belief that the bridge pictured above is called the Glenwood B&O Railroad Bridge, which is a still active 1884 rail crossing over the Monongahela River, as observed from the Duck Hollow Trail. This is one of those spots I’ll be returning to.
Further, my understanding is that the bridge is used by the Allegheny Valley Railroad. AVRR is a bit of a white whale for me, as in – it’s seldom there when I’m looking for it, and only serendipity is on my side when I see it. Saying that, I’ve figured out the framing for this shot should I ever see a train crossing the river here.
Yay for me.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This POV is at the very end of the Duck Hollow Trail, which is discussed in prior posts, and nearby the smallish Glenwood Junction rail yard. This is going to be a nice shot as well, when and if I’m present as a train passes through the frame.
The part of this blog I seldom discuss here is the endless amount of time spent finding these point of view locations, figuring out a parking/walking route, and getting to and from these locations. It’s part of being prepared for ‘the moment’ and it’s a heck of a lot of work.
Good news is that you really burn out a lot of miles, so exercise.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Despite the fact that I had a bag of lenses hanging off my back, I only ended up using the 28-105 zoom for this entire excursion. It did the job and offered me all of the wide/up close range needed for this walk. By the time I got back to the car, I had walked just over 5 miles in 2 hours. I had probably popped out about 200 exposures, which filtered down to about 50 shots in the end, of which about 40 ended up getting uploaded to Flickr. This is pretty normal practice for me, I always crack out two to three exposures of any given composition, just to make sure ‘I got it.’
At any rate, back tomorrow with something different.
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