The Newtown Pentacle

Thursday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Having completed a full circuit of the surviving sections of the Carrie Furnace in Pittsburgh’s Swissvale, while participating in a ‘Photo Safari’ event offered by the Rivers of Steel outfit, a humble narrator decided to cap off the effort by stepping back inside the structure where the morning got started.

I don’t know if this is Furnace #6 or #7 pictured above, but they’re the only ones left over from the centuried history of this section of the larger U.S. Steel Homestead Steel Plant.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

It’s difficult to convey the scale of this place, even in photographs. Those three yellow rectangles in the middle of the shot above are park benches used for visitor’s seating, for a reference. This must have looked like – as Mark Twain described it – hell loosed upon the earth, prior to the plants closure in 1986. Imagine it – coked coal fires and molten metal flying around. Hundreds of workers pulling levers and turning wheels, all sorts of gigantic machinery moving around…

I wasn’t able to find a historical video of Carrie at work, but here’s a 1981 educational film reel from Periscope which describes the steel making process at another American mega mill. There’s some interesting local documentarian work happening right now about Pittsburgh’s Industrial past and its workforce, so check out ‘City of Steel.’ If you’re interested in seeing what the railroad and industrial activity at a working steel mill – The Edgar Thomson Works, which is about a mile or so away from Carrie – looks like, check out the AMAZING Time Lapse photography offered at ‘Fort Frick.’

– photo by Mitch Waxman

I’m guessing that this thingamabob is… actually, I’m really in no position to guess but I think that the thingamabob is called a ‘torpedo car.’ Hardest thing in the world for most people, me in particular, is saying ‘I don’t know.’ It’s better to profess ignorance than to say something stupid or wrong, but one does lead to the other. Ignorance can be fixed, usually by reading a book or something. Stupid, on the other hand… it stays with ya.

I’m also really, really trying to not start sentences with ‘Actually’… I’ve also developed a pet peeve which revolves around people saying ‘We’ when discussing social issues in public. ‘We.’ Who’s ‘We,’ and did y’all have an ‘effin meeting to decide and agree on what youse all think before you showed up to point a finger at something ya don’t like but were too afraid to say “I” in public and stand behind an opinion so you say ‘We’? …we… sheiste.

I digress.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

I finished up the excursion to Carrie Furnace more or less where I first mounted the camera up on the tripod. The interval was nearly over, and a few last shots were on the menu for me to get.

The shot directly above is a parallel view of the first shot in todays post, captured when the sunlight was at its morning zenith. Uggh… as mentioned – Worst time of day.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

There’s artwork interspersed with all of this relict technology, which is something I didn’t focus in on at all during this series. There’s metal sculptures here and there, and one or two of the pieces are gigantic – notably one of a stag’s head. It’s a pretty inspiring place, this.

As mentioned, I’m meant to be returning to this spot at the end of July, during the sunset to dusk to twilight period between 6:30-9:30 p.m. Looking forward to the adventure of that and thinking about bringing a few LED lamps along with me as well in case I need a bit of accent light here and there.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Well, that’s what I did on that particular weekend morning, here in Pittsburgh. What an adventure. Check out the Rivers of Steel people’s offerings here at Carrie Furnaces if you find yourself in the Paris of Appalachia and want to do something a bit off the beaten track.

Back tomorrow, with something else!

“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.

Wednesday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Continuing the series of posts from my visit to the Rivers of Steel ‘Photo Safari’ at the Carrie Furnaces in Pittsburgh’s Swissvale section.

Actually, I don’t know if Swissvale is it’s own thing – town, village, borough – or what. This ‘commonwealth’ business out here is fairly inscrutable, as offered here in the Keystone State of Pennsylvania. You’ve got towns, cities, boroughs… HQ, for instance, is in the Borough of Dormont, but if you were to send me a letter you’d address it as ‘Pittsburgh.’ Additionally, my place is found in Dormont, but the guy across the street from me lives in Pittsburgh (City of…). It’s weird, man.

It gets even more complicated when it comes to Cops and Fire coverage in Pittsburgh. There’s Sheriffs, and Constables, and ‘regular’ Police. The local departments seem to be trained for the day to day stuff, whereas if there’s a homicide or something really complicated they’ll first call out the ‘DT’s’ from Pittsburgh PD, and then above the PPD Detectives there’s the Pennsylvania State Troopers who handle all sorts of high level stuff but who also do the regular cop duties when needed. I haven’t seen any of these Troopers yet (you wouldn’t miss them as they wear Smokey the Bear hats with the chin strap) and supposedly there’s a whole other Federal level of law enforcement here as well, including FBI and the rest of the alphabet agencies.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

In the two posts prior to this one, it was mentioned that that I had somewhat free reign to wander about large sections of the Carrie Furnace site, with my camera mounted up on a tripod. I moved in an anticlockwise or widdershins direction. This had a lot to do with the position of the sun, and was a little bit influenced by an intellectual game I play with myself.

It was a fairly warm day, and that rarest of things in Pittsburgh – a clear sky – allowed the radiation of the burning thermonuclear eye of god itself to cascade to the ground unimpeded. Sol Invictus, amirite?

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The remains of a rail connection and a crane are found on the Carrie site. Location wise, on the other side of that graffiti’d wall is a sloping and quite wooded bank of the Monongahela River. The graffiti is intentional, and several panels of the wall were displaying rendered mural paintings in addition to the more traditional tags and letterform stuff. They do workshops for this art form here, and in addition there are classes which teach aluminum, and iron, sculptural casting technique.

After this post publishes, I’m certain that several people will be compelled to leave a comment describing the function and history of the rail line and the privately owned (‘private’ as in owned and operated by U.S. Steel) freight rail service that used to feed raw materials into the plant. Have at it, railfans!

– photo by Mitch Waxman

One of the old locomotive units is actually on display.

A humble narrator continued to circle the remains of Carrie Furnace, clicking the camera’s shutter as I went. I wasn’t trying to do anything too fancy, just working the scene. Whenever you ‘come in cold’ to a place like this, you need to ‘look up, down, all around’ since there was zero prep other than the basics. You also can’t let yourself bog down and spend all your time focused on one thing, or another, because you don’t know what’s just around the corner. I know a lot of photographers who would just stroll in, take a single shot and say ‘one and done.’ That ain’t the Mitch way.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

I figure that if you’ve got three hours, which I had, that’s 180 minutes you don’t want to waste. Plenty of time afterwards to chat with the other participants. I wish that I wasn’t there between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m., but there you go. Just about the worst part of day for light. Good news? It wasn’t raining. Truth be told, I wouldn’t mind the rain if we were there at dusk, or dawn.

The even better news? I have Tix for another Photo Safari at Carrie Furnace in late July which starts at 6:30 p.m. and goes till 9:30 p.m. Now that I know what to expect, I’ve already started planning for that one. As long time readers will tell you, I like low light.

Bwah hah ha.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Tomorrow’s post will finish describing the circuit around Carrie Furnace. This was absolutely one of the most exciting things I’ve gotten to experience here in Pittsburgh, and that’s saying something.

Back tomorrow.

“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.

Tuesday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

As described yesterday, a humble narrator bought his way onto a ‘photo safari’ event at the Carrie Furnaces in Pittsburgh’s Swissvale section. A National Historic Place, Carrie was once part of U.S. Steel’s Homestead works – which – during its time – was the largest steel plant on the planet. A guide from the Rivers of Steel outfit, which cares for and manages the place, had given us a brief overview and walk through description of where we could and couldn’t go. After that, she headed back to the front gate, and since free reign was now in effect – I got busy.

These are all tripod shots, and represent a delicate balancing act as far as exposure goes. Within the structures, it was either morning daylight shining through, or deeply shadowed. As in the case of the shot above, it was both simultaneously. Luckily, I know a camera trick or two to handle this sort of thing.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

I’ve mentioned ‘photo stacking’ before, although in the context of focus. This technique involves moving the lens’ point of focus, on a tripod mounted camera, around the frame during multiple exposures. For example – You do one close up, one middle depth, and one focused on infinity. In photoshop the three are combined, with the software building a single uniformly sharp image out of the three. I’ve used this technique a lot over the years, and it’s particularly useful when doing landscape shots.

You can also photo stack for exposure. This gets a little more complicated, and the hard part of it is remembering what you were doing when you shot the subject in the field, as you’re slogging through the image folder while back at HQ and in front of the computer. The shot above, for instance, used one exposure and point of focus for the interior foreground, and a second set of settings for the brightly lit exterior. A lot of trial and error has gone into understanding what to feed the software, as far as the raw image, in order to get a predictable result.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

This one uses a more traditional application of the technique, with one focus point trained on the interior brick and metal combined with a second shot that was focused without. Yeah, I know… as the kids in Quadrophenia would have remarked: wizard.

While we were doing the walk through, I was already hatching my plan for how to shoot this place. I had decided to spend a half hour or so inside the plant itself, and then walk widdershins (anticlockwise) around it. This decision was based on where I thought the burning thermonuclear eye of god itself would be hanging in the sky, during my visit to Carrie Furnace.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Also described yesterday, I wish that I could offer you a granular and well understood picture of what you’re looking at, but I know very little about metals production and about steel in particular. Truth be told, the phrase that kept on popping up in my brain while shooting these images was ‘Triborough Bridge.’ Now… that’s something I know about.

A theory (originally offered by Robert Caro) which I’m fond of is that Robert Moses was the reason that the USA ended up being the 800 pound Gorilla during WW2. When Moses placed the steel orders for Triborough in 1932, the furnaces of Pittsburgh were reactivated, after their slumber in the early days of Great Depression. The steel supply chain was also activated, creating an economic and industrial wave which rippled out of Pittsburgh to the coal and iron mines of the interior via the railroads. A forest was cut down just to make the lumber needed for Triborough’s construction scaffolding. Some 31 million man hours, playing out in 134 cities across 20 states, went into Triborough, as Caro stated.

When Pearl Harbor occurred nine years later, it didn’t take too long for the United States to conjure up a brand new Pacific Fleet to the Japanese, for their consideration, because ‘hell with the lid off’ (as Mark Twain once described Pittsburgh) was all fired up and ready to rock. If Moses hadn’t brokered his power to build that massive bridge complex with its 17.5 miles of roadways in NY Harbor…

The steel in the Empire State Building was created at Carrie, as a note. That’s bit of trivia is something I learned off of a beer mug in a Pittsburgh bar and it seems to be true.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Sorry, NYC slips back in sometimes… this is Pittsburgh… not…

I began my slow circling of the Carrie Furnace, with the camera mounted up on the Sirui Carbon Fiber tripod that I’ve been using for the last five years or so. It’s just light enough to be ‘carryable,’ and therefore I almost always have it with me. I seem to recall that I had the camera set up for ISO 100, F8, and exposure time was whatever it needed to be. I didn’t use the wired shutter release switch as I normally do, and just had the camera set to wait out a small delay after I hit the shutter button to ameliorate ‘shake.’ I opted for the Canon 24-105mm lens this time around. I had others with me, but the wide to telephoto range of this piece of glass was perfect for the site.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The yellow chains seen in the middle of the shot indicated ‘no go’ areas as designated by the Rivers of Steel people. They explained that these areas were unstable and could be dangerous, which is also why we were asked to wear hard hats. Situations like this are also where the virtue of using a zoom lens for this sort of location comes into play.

Back in Queens, I’d regularly get contacted by photographers who were interested in Newtown Creek but were a little worried about their safety or where they could go. I’d always gladly take them out for a walk, and pass on the things I’d learned over the years. Invariably, I’d find them walking onto slippery shoreline rocks, or doing some other dangerous stunt to get a close up of something. After they were done and safely back on the pavement, I’d say ‘isn’t that a zoom lens’?

Back tomorrow with more from Carrie Furnace.

“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.