Posts Tagged ‘Sunrise’
So, the sun rose again
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Recent endeavor found a humble narrator waking up at 5 in the morning and then driving over to the West End Overlook Park, in Pittsburgh’s Eliot section, for sunrise. A new lens has been acquired, one which finally replaces my old Sigma 18-300mm Superzoom that was a ‘go-to’ on my older camera. The Sigma was a ‘crop sensor’ lens, so adapting it onto my current ‘full frame’ setup never was a good idea as I was throwing away a third of the image by doing so.
The new glass I’ve acquired is from Canon, and it’s a 24-240mm superzoom. Nothing better for testing a lens than mounting the camera onto the tripod and doing a sunrise session, I seldom say.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is very much a ‘daylight’ and ‘outdoors’ lens, with a fairly narrow maximum aperture, but I was impressed by the results it produced. It’s heavy, but with this new device in my bag, I can leave several other lenses at home and go out with ‘bare minimum kit.’
Pictured is a CSX freight train rounding a bend along the Monongahela River on Pittsburgh’s south side.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The shots in todays post were all captured in about an hour or so, and they were selected not to necessarily display the growing illumination of the burning thermonuclear eye of god itself, rather they just kind of fit in with what I was trying to do here – discerning the failings and strengths of the glass before my return window closed on it.
If a lens sucks, I send it back.
That’s Allegheny General Hospital in the shot above.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Looking downward at West End Bridge’s approach ramps just as the morning light reached them.
Just like my old Sigma lens, this new one operates best with a narrow aperture – I like f8 for this kind of shooting. It’s a variable aperture zoom, f4 at the wide side and f6.3 at the telephoto side.
At some point I decided to pop the camera off of the tripod, activate the lens’ image stabilizer technology, and then shoot handheld for a while. It behaved like a champ.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Long telephoto lenses are pretty expensive when you get to the high end, especially the ones you’ll see sports and bird photographers brandishing. I didn’t need anything like that, as I don’t regularly shoot those sorts of things. Instead, being able to quickly dial between wide angle and long telephoto was what I’ve been missing in recent months.
This one looks down the Monongahela River, and that’s the Fort Pitt Bridge at bottom right.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Wide open at 24mm, you can see the range that the zoom lens offers when comparing it with the 240mm shot which preceded it. This is a bit wider than human vision, but was more or less the scene I was looking at.
Back tomorrow with something different, at this, your Newtown Pentacle.
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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.
A better morning
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After a disappointing sunset photo session at West End Overlook Park here in Pittsburgh, described in last Friday’s post, a humble but quite frustrated narrator set an early alarm the next morning and set out to see if sunrise would provide me with better results from both effort and location.
I ran into that deer again, incidentally.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Luckily, there were banks of clouds rolling around the heavenly vault, and there was also a bit of morning fog. Both atmospheric conditions allowed for the light to carry and push a bunch of color about, so I got busy.
Learning how Pittsburgh’s light behaves has been an adventure, I tell you. This is very much a ‘morning’ sort of place.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Down on the Ohio River, a towing company was moving barges about. There was also quite a bit of automotive traffic rolling about, as you’d imagine on a week day morning. I arrived at this location before the Spotted Lantern Flies woke up. Pittsburgh is infested with these things, and Moe the Dog eats so many of them every day that it’s become part of the little goblin’s diet.
The other day, Moe stood up on his hind legs with his hands on a deck rail/bannister, while attempting to spy out where his next lanternfly snack was hiding. I called out to him, and when he looked over his shoulder at me it was a freakishly horrific sight which reminded me of something from a Tolkien story. Two legs bad, four legs good.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Looking towards the Allegheny River’s North Shore in this shot.
A humble narrator has always been an ‘owl’ rather than a ‘lark,’ as far as wakefulness goes, and have always been conspicuously awake late into the night. At the moment, I’m trying to unspool the habits of a lifetime lived in a City that never slept but enjoyed the odd nap, and am attempting to get into step with a City which wakes up early and watches the sun come up over coffees.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One has repeatedly found himself setting an alarm for 4:30 or 5 in the morning, showering while the water is boiling up for the morning ‘cuppa,’ and jetting out of HQ to get some exercise or wave the camera around at something. The quality of light seems to be better at dawn than at dusk, and mid day is nothing but harsh shadows and blown out highlights. I plan on figuring out night shooting here during the cold months.
This shot overlooks the so called ‘North side.’
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The deer didn’t seem at all worried about me being there while it was eating breakfast. After the burning thermonuclear eye of God itself had risen in the sky, any desire I had to shoot from West End Overlook dissipated as I was staring directly into the radioactive fireball.
I packed up my gear and hopped back into the Mobile Oppression Platform, and then drove over to the North Side water front which is pictured above. More on that 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.
something tangible
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Recent endeavor found a humble narrator in my happy place – Industrial Maspeth – before the burning thermonuclear eye of god itself emerged from behind Nassau County in the east. I was at the Maspeth Avenue Plank Road, with the tripod and full bag of gear.
Daylight savings time, coupled with the paucity of daylight hours and the atrocious angle of the winter sun relative to NYC’s street grid, negates a lot of photographic opportunities. Sunsets and sunrises are really your only chance for “magic moments” this time of year. One has been making an effort to commit to one or the other time interval at least once a week.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Maspeth Avenue Plank Road is the stubby remain of a bridge which last crossed Newtown Creek during the Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, and it’s found just shy of three miles from the East River. It adjoins a section of Newtown Creek called “the Turning Basin.” This area is conventionally referred to as being the most environmentally compromised section of the waterway, as a point of interest. Industrial usage of this zone of Newtown Creek included an enormous and quite dirty Manufactured Gas Plant on the Brooklyn side, and a chemical/acid factory and high volume copper refinery on the Queens shoreline. There were a lot of other businesses with lovely occupations housed on both sides – fertilizer and rendering mills, night soil processors, secondary manufacturers and packagers for petroleum refining byproducts like paraffin waxes and naphtha – for instance.
It’s nice. At sunrise, fleets of birds take to the air.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The big LNG fuel tank at the right side of the shot is one of two such apparatuses found in Greenpoint at the National Grid property. Grid’s footprint used to be Keyspan, and before that it was Brooklyn Union Gas’s. BUG was the manufacturer of the “natural” gas mentioned above. When Grid bought up all of the BUG assets, via their purchase of the Keyspan outfit who had previously acquired the property, they also assumed Superfund liability and responsibility for cleaning up all of BUG’s “yuck” here in Newtown Creek’s turning basin.
That’s the happy place for ya.
“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.
problematical attempt
Alright already, jeez.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As previously mentioned, Our Lady of the Pentacle and myself enjoyed a short vacation at the end of the last month, and for part of that duration we were at sea. Hence, your humble narrator is a bit short on content as I’ve been off my beaten path. Therefore, a couple of shots of the oceanic sky greet you today. This was about 15 minutes or so after the burning thermonuclear eye of god itself opened.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Sunset, on the same day as the one above. We hit weather for most of the “away game,” it was 42 degrees in Florida for instance, so seeing the ole burning thermonuclear eye of god itself open and close at all was a treat.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
The Newtown Pentacle 