The Newtown Pentacle

Tuesday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

HQ is located in a suburb of Pittsburgh called “The Borough of Dormont,” which is – I’m told – a square mile in size. One of Dormont’s conceits when it was chartered is that there would be no ‘mean streets’ here, as every single roadway is instead labeled as an Avenue. It’s silly, but there you are. HQ is found at the bottom of a steep hill, where three of those avenues all dead end at a forested gorge. I’m still investigating my local vicinity, incidentally. The shot above is from about a block from HQ.

Recently, while walking Moe the Dog down one of those dead end streets, I stumbled upon a badly maintained, and heavily grown over, set of municipal steps. Pittsburgh has hundreds of examples of this sort of infrastructure snaking about in the hills and valleys, by products of the era before automobiles. It occurred to me that these steps would be handy, in terms of bleeding out some of Moe’s excessive puppy energies, but as is my habit – I’d need to check them out first before bringing him along – just in case. ‘Next time I’m walking to the T light rail’ said I, and now you’re all caught up.

This is the setup for this post.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Novelty, on this particular day, was experienced by a humble narrator, which revolved around a trick recently learned about how Amazon.com works which ended up with me using some new gear.

Amazon recently had one of their ‘Prime Day’ promotions, which offer deep discounts on otherwise ‘never on sale’ items, like Canon lenses. The Prime Day thing revolves around the fact that sale prices pop up and then disappear, which is how Amazon gets you to spend time on their site shopping for other crap you don’t want, while you are forced into reloading specific product pages over and over. The trick I learned is to set up a wish list, populated with these specific items which you want to keep an eye on the pricing of. The wish list updates itself when something on the product page changes , and you can instantly see if an item on the list gets discounted.

That’s how I ended up with two new prime lenses I’ve been wanting, which I got for roughly 35% off of the normal price, with free shipping.

This particular walk was going to be an all day sort of thing, during which I’d be waving the new lenses around and seeing what they could do. That’s the flight of municipal steps nearby HQ, by the way, which was the start of the endeavor occurred.

That’s the circumstance.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The municipal steps are in worse condition than they look, and they look pretty bad. The concrete planks you walk on are jiggly, the iron rails and foundation are rusted and often disconnected from the superstructure. In some spots, there’s no railing at all. The steps are set into a hillside at a comfortable angle, and scuttling up them from one street corner to the next transverses about six to seven stories of vertical space. They’re not treacherous, but seem fairly disused and forgotten, which is something endearing to me. I’ve since returned here with Moe, who enjoys bunny hopping up them.

The first new lens isn’t terribly exciting news – it’s a ‘nifty fifty’ F1.8 50mm lens, with the Canon RF mount. I’ve got the EF mount version (which is the non mirrorless camera version), and have for years, but you need to use an adapter for it on my Canon R6 camera – which is a pain.

The other new lens, which today’s post was shot with, is an F2.8 16mm wide angle dealie. Neither one is ‘perfect,’ I would mention. They aren’t ‘L’ series, which is Canon’s professional grade – a super expensive family of lenses, or ‘glass.’ Some of these L lenses are the same price as a good used car, and are built for pro sports or wedding photographers.

That’s the conflict.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The 16mm definitely has a bit of a fish eye distortion thing going on, with chromatic aberrations and vignetting quite visible at the corners of the frame. Aperture wise, it’s built as an F2.8, but like many ‘bright lenses,’ narrowing it to F4 is a wise move. Every lens has a ‘sweet spot’ setting. The point of shooting a lot with any new lens is to experimentally twist the settings about until you find a rational compromise between them while discovering its particular quirks. I didn’t see much improvement in the 16mm’s performance with apertures narrower than F4, so I’m calling that as the sweet spot. Aperture equates to ‘depth of field,’ fall off, and overall sharpness.

The 16mm is pretty good on color, as well. Different refractory coatings on the various lens families will often create hue or color shifts that you have to watch out. My Sigma lenses, for instance, perform better on the ‘hot’ color spectrums of yellow and red than on blues. The Canon ones tend to create over saturated blues, but simply rock and roll when the subject is pale human skin (dark skin, on the other hand…).

That’s the exposition.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

This set of municipal stairs in Dormont ends after a single block, during which you’ve moved upwards something in the neighborhood of 70-80 feet. Maybe more, perhaps less, I don’t measure (at the end of this long walk, the Health app on my phone reported that I had walked 21 flights of stairs, and just under 12 miles, in toto for that day). My reckoning, and what it felt like, was not unlike walking to the sixth or seventh floor of a building.

The burn really set in after I surmounted the stairs and was then scuttling up a hill on the sidewalk instead, which had to be set against the hill at a 15-20 degree angle. Whoof – but, good cardio – it really got the ticker pumping, I tell’s ya, but I did have to stop a couple of times to catch my breath. The stairs got a thumbs up from me, on the other hand. Our Lady of the Pentacle approved them, subsequently, for Moe’s usage.

Moe finds them exquisite, as he can haul me up them at great rates of speed.

Right in the center of the shot, where those two houses are, is where the stairs return you to the street Avenue. The change in altitude between the stairs, and the spot where this shot was cracked out, is something like four car lengths long (16mm wide angle, so it looks longer than it was due to ‘fisheye’) and about twenty feet in altitude. Pittsburgh is crazy.

The new lenses are what I used for several of the shots that will be popping up here over the next couple of days, by the way. The virtue of these new ‘pieces of glass’ is that they are incredibly light and easy to carry. Any three of these prime lenses still weigh far less than any of my zoom lenses. The pro “L Series” 28-105mm F4 zoom which is my ‘go-to’, in comparison, weighs something like three and half pounds.

Long time readers will recall that during the pandemic I was often going out for night walks with just two prime lenses – a 24mm and a 50mm mounted on my old Canon 7D street camera, and subsequently a 35mm and an 85mm on my newer Canon R6 mirrorless unit. The kit of primes I’m carrying around now are 16mm f2.8, 35mm f1.8, 50mm f1.8, and an 85mm f2 – one lens on the camera, three in the bag.

A minimal kit that’s easy to carry, and versatile for day and night shooting. I’ve got one of two other things in the camera bag – wire release, rocket blower, lens cloth, a spare battery – that’s it.

My ‘full kit’ fills a 32 liter backpack, and weighs about 15-20 pounds when the tripod is attached to the bag. I’ve got the entire arsenal in there. It depends on what I intend doing during the day, which bag I carry.

That’s the resolution.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

At the top of the hill, whose roadways dead end nearby HQ at its bottom, here in the Pittsburgh suburb of Dormont, one encounters the T light rail tracks, and stations, which ride on the top of a ridge road that is called Broadway Avenue. Service on the light rail is fairly frequent, and I wasn’t there ten minutes before a Pittsburgh bound train set came along. We are about 5 miles away from the center of the city here in Dormont. It’s about a 25- 30 minute ride to the end of the line on Pittsburgh’s North Side, which is across the street from where the Steelers’ sports ball stadium is found.

Tomorrow, continuance of testing for these new lenses continues. All of today’s shots were captured with the new 16mm. The thing has real potential, night time shooting wise. Looking forward to seeing what I can make it do.

Back tomorrow with more – at this – your Newtown Pentacle.

That’s the promise.

---

“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.