mattblaze

This was a three second exposure (with about 10 stops of neutral density). The sun was behind the clouds and just above the center of the frame; the lens required careful flagging to avoid glare.

The rendering of water, especially in the sea, differs greatly with exposure. 30 seconds looks quite different from 3 seconds, which is just as different from 1/30 sec, which is different from 1/1000 sec. About 1/30 sec renders roughly the way our vision does; anything else requires a camera to see.

@[email protected] You weren't that far off - the public safety tower is on the same hill.

With a few exceptions (mostly towers atop downtown switching offices in populated areas), no one was trying to make any of this utilitarian communications infrastructure beautiful. It was form strictly following function, built to be reliable and rugged.

But there was, I think, quite a bit of beauty to find in it. I wonder if we'll look at our current neighborhood cellular towers, now often regarded as a visual blight, the same way decades after they're (inevitably) also gone.

The San Jose Oak Hill Tower is unique in a number of ways. The concrete brutalist design appears not to have been replicated anywhere else; it seems to have been site-specific. It sits atop an underground switching center (that was partly used for a military contract), which explains the relatively hardened design.

Today the underground switch is still there, owned by AT&T, but the tower space is leased to land mobile and cellular providers. The old horn antennas at top are disconnected.

For much of the 20th century, the backbone of the AT&T "Long Lines" long distance telephone network consisted primarily of terrestrial microwave links (rather than copper or fiber cables). Towers with distinctive KS-15676 "horn" antennas could be seen on hilltops and atop switching center buildings across the US; they were simply part of the American landscape.

Most of the relay towers were simple steel structures. This brutalist concrete platform in San Jose was, I believe, of a unique design.

Captured with the Rodenstock 50mm/4.0 HR Digaron-W lens (@ f/4.5) on a Cambo WRS-1600 camera (with about 15mm of vertical shift to preserve the geometry), the Phase One IQ4-150 back (@ ISO 50) in dual exposure mode (which preserves a couple stops of additional dynamic range into the shadows).

The tower's shape is irregular; it tapers slightly.

The wide angle and panoramic orientation give a bit of context, alone on a hill (which is being rapidly encroached by adjacent residential development).

@[email protected] Central Park is truly a gem.

Captured with a small full frame mirrorless camera and 21mm lens.

A six second exposure created a motion study; we can see how people move around the plaza. Or perhaps they're ghosts.

Compositionally, this is mostly a study of circles and rings, with an imaginary diagonal radiating from the fountain to the man with the camera in the lower right.

The skyscrapers along Park Avenue in the 40's and lower 50's are all minor engineering marvels. They're built atop the rail yard for Grand Central Terminal (an early adopter of the modern real estate concept of "air rights"). Many of the newer buildings are much taller than was anticipated when the terminal was constructed more than a century ago. This heavily constrains their foundations and anchor points, leading to unusual load-bearing designs such as the steelwork shown in the photo.

Captured with the Phase One IQ4-150 Achromatic back and the Rodenstock 138mm/6.5 HR Digaron-SW lens, which, unusually for large format lenses, employs a floating element integrated into the focusing helical.

This photo is a literal image of a construction site (to become the new JP Morgan building), but also an exercise in abstract precisionism and cubism. We see the new skyscraper, and the buildings in the background, essentially as a Mondrian-esq deconstructed tangle of lines and rectangles.

I have mixed feelings about Le Corbusier's architecture (to say nothing of his urban planning philosophy - he clearly influenced Robert Moses), but I think the UN Secretariat building was one of his successes.

An aside: If you look at the full resolution version (downloadable on flickr), you can see the HF amateur radio antenna on the roof. Nerds are everywhere, even/especially at the UN. There's also a family taking a group picture on the street in front.

The UN Secretariat building was designed by an international team of architects (most notably Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer) and completed in 1950. It was the first important "International Style" modernist skyscraper in New York - exemplified here here by a simple, unadorned rectangle with reflective glass curtain walls on either side.

Glass box office buildings became almost cliche in mid-century NYC, but the UN remains unusual in being set apart in the skyline, uncrowded by neighbors.