@hexamander@infosec.exchange Thank you!

This photo really pushes the limits of what you can do with 35mm format lenses, but I leaned in to the limitations and it worked out OK. I ended up switching to the Phase One system a few months later, which is much more flexible when you need view camera movements.

The Inquirer building also housed (until a few years before they moved) their printing plant, making it one of the last major dailies where it was at least theoretically possible for an editor to run downstairs and yell “stop the presses!” if a major story came in. But I’ll bet that didn’t actually happen very often.

This was captured with a DSLR and a 19mm shifting lens. There’s a bit of barrel distortion from the lens, but I decided this image looked better uncorrected.

The Inquirer building, completed in 1924, to me evokes a cigar-chomping editor who calls everyone “kid” and who says things like “bring me back a scoop”.

The building had been vacant for a few years when this photo was made, the paper having moved to cheaper and leaner facilities. It has since been repurposed as police headquarters.

Captured with the Rodenstock 23mm/5.6 HR-Digaron-S lens and Phase One IQ4-150 Achromatic Back, polarizer+590nm (red) filter.

Washington DC is not a city of many notable inclines, and so lacks the proliferation of “step streets” found in places like Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and The Bronx. Most famous are Georgetown’s Exorcist Steps (so named for the fatal effect they have on members of that profession), and, shown here, Kalorama’s Spanish Steps, which occupy 22nd St NW between S and Decatur.

Precisionism, a roughly century-old modernist American art movement related to cubism, is a strong influence here. Its practitioners included Joseph Stella, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Charles Demuth. Paul Strand was probably the most prominent precisionist photographer.

Precisionism is concerned with structure and geometry as well as the relationship between humans, machines, and the industrial landscape.

I’m interested in how the precisionists might interpret the world as it’s become today.

These (de-electrified) catenary wires were captured with a Sinar P camera and a 240mm lens on Polaroid 55 film (scanned) along the former Pennsylvania Railroad’s “high line” in west Philadelphia near the university.

This abstract composition references a 1936 painting, “Electrification”, by precisionist artist Ralston Crawford; see https://hirshhorn.si.edu//collection/artwork/?edanUrl=edanmdm%3Ahmsg_72.75

This is an IR photo, made in afternoon light with a 1000nm filter and the Phase One Achromatic back. 1000nm is a fairly long IR wavelength, rendering a soft, surreal look. (IR photos are usually captured around 750-800nm). I used the Rodenstock 50mm HR-Digaron, which leaves the moon small in the frame but still recognizable.

This is (of course) a nod to Ansel Adams’ “Moonrise, Hernandez, NM”. But Adams’ 1941 photo was made just after sunset, in the visible spectrum. See https://www.moma.org/collection/works/53904

@Robgbysea@mstdn.social that’s right. Just straight up USB, with regular marine HF radios.

You’ll notice that each site operated on multiple frequency pairs across the HF spectrum. This was for two reasons. First, each channel could only handle one call at a time, and so this allowed for more simultaneous traffic. Second, not all frequency bands were usable (due to atmospheric and geomagnetic conditions) at any given time. So in practice, at most half a dozen or so ships PER OCEAN could use the system at any moment.

Multiple transmitters shared the antennas using tuned combiners.

By the way, here’s what I believe was the final published frequency list and schedule for the AT&T high seas service, (a souvenir of one of my visits to the station before it went off the air).

I should note that while the site (and its cousins) had a number of large discone antennas like this one, they were mostly there as backups in case the main antennas (which included truly massive wire rhombics oriented toward various oceanic regions) or transmitter combiners failed.

The old Bell System did not mess around.

Ships on the high seas still occasionally make some use of shortwave radio, but its importance has greatly diminished over the last few decades. The Coast Guard still maintains a “watch” on emergency shortwave frequencies, listening for distress calls, but most transoceanic ships are now equipped with more modern, higher-bandwidth satellite communications systems.

Places like this are what the Internet looked like a century ago. Infrastructure is often heroic, and occasionally looks the part.

There were three AT&T radiotelephone sites in the continental US, each with its own transmit and receive antenna farms: Ocean Gate, NJ (shown here, serving the North Atlantic), Miami (serving the Caribbean and the Gulf), and Point Reyes, CA (serving the Pacific).

All the sites have by now been razed, either for redevelopment or as nature preserves. The antennas (including this one) are mostly gone now.

Captured with a DSLR and a 24mm shifting lens.

During the 20th century, AT&T operated a shortwave “radiotelephone” service for vessels on the high seas. Ships could contact an operator, who could connect them with any landline telephone number they wished.

The North Atlantic station, callsign WOO, occupied expansive transmit and receive “antenna farms” in marshlands near the shore in central New Jersey.

Rendered obsolete by satellites, the service ceased operation on November 9, 1999.

@chris_bloke The floor of a landing

This abstract photo, captured inside a lighthouse with a small 35mm-format mirrorless camera and a 50mm lens, is mostly a visual pun on the concept of a lighthouse, as well as a study in diagonal and radiating lines.

It was very tight quarters, especially with the tripod. But a tripod was essential here (less for sharpness - at 1/3000 sec - than for composition and framing).

Obsolete secret infrastructure like CARTWHEEL tower, only revealed decades later, intrigues me not just for its scale and design, but also for the obvious question it gives rise to. If this stuff effectively managed to stay unnoticed for decades, what newer secrets are hiding under our noses today?

Despite CARTWHEEL being located in the middle of a residential neighborhood in a busy city and staffed by military personnel, officials went to great lengths to conceal the true purpose of these towers. They hid in plain sight, appearing to be silos or water towers (they even used civilian water trucks to send crews to some of the towers).

It was only after the cold war ended that the details of the network were declassified.

The upper white section of the tower is actually a plexiglass radome, concealing various microwave and UHF radio antennas.

CARTWHEEL and its cousins were decommissioned around 1990. Most of the towers, mainly atop mountains in remote areas, were demolished or left to rot. However, CARTWHEEL and CORKSCREW (on a mountain near the Appalachian trail in central Maryland) have been maintained in good condition, now repurposed by the FAA.