@tokensane@mastodon.me.uk I would definitely have a Battersea coffee table in my living room.

This is another image in my "slightly better versions of the pictures of local attractions you might find decorating the walls of inexpensive hotel rooms" series.

The power station has long been an iconic landmark on the south bank of the Thames, distinctive for its four prominent smokestacks (two for each of its two separate generating facilities) and industrial art deco architecture. Perhaps most famously, it featured in the cover art for Pink Floyd's 1977 “Animals” album, with one of London's (sadly now extinct) giant flying pigs captured hovering near the smokestacks.

London's Battersea Power Station, built as two nearly-identical halves completed in 1935 and 1955, respectively, was originally a coal-fired electrical generating plant. It was decommissioned in 1983. After being idle for nearly 40 years, the plant has been re-developed as retail space and commercial offices, opened in 2022. Along with the Tate Modern, it gives London a second striking example of large-scale adaptive reuse of an obsolete, but still handsome, power station.

Rodenstock 70mm/5.6 Digaron-W (@ f/8), Phase One IQ4-150 digital back (@ ISO 50), Cambo WRS 1200 camera (right shifted 20mm, vertically shifted 8mm).

This composition fully exploited the image circle and edge sharpness of the lens. We're to the right of the power station, but to preserve the geometry of the river side facade, the camera was pointed straight ahead, parallel with that side of the building. The camera back was then horizontally shifted to move the building back into position.

This was made with a DSLR and a swinging lens to provide selective focus on the milepost at left. This moved the plane of focus to be non-parallel with the sensor, yielding only a sliver in focus.

Image was was captured at "Park Junction" in Philadelphia, where the former Reading Railroad once met the former Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. What caught my eye was the old school graffiti moniker on the base of the milepost, in a style traditionally used by yard workers and hobos to tag freight cars.

More ICBM photos and discussion here: https://www.mattblaze.org/blog/titans/

Captured with a DSLR and a Zeiss 21mm Distagon lens. Handheld (there was no room to set up a tripod).

In 2009, I was fortunate to join a "top to bottom" tour of former Air Force Titan ICBM site 571-7, now preserved as a museum. Titan II missiles carried a nine megaton(!) "physics package" in the "reentry vehicle" (which they emphatically assured me had been removed from this missile, but I still wouldn't advise upsetting them too much).

@LapTop006@aus.social annoyingly, they don’t seem to (currently) sell it without a back. If they did, and I didn’t already have a 23, I’d consider buying an XC sans back instead of a 23 in the XT/cambo mount.

@LapTop006@aus.social Yeah, but if you just get an XT and a 23mm, you get the ability to interchange lenses and use movements without much extra size. I guess someone is buying XCs, I just can't figure out who it's for.

@LapTop006@aus.social I frankly don't understand the point of the XC. It's only slightly smaller than the XT with the 23, but you can't interchange the lenses and you get no movements (granted, not much movement is possible with the 23 anyway).

I used the 32mm Rodenstock here. I could have just barely squeezed this into a single frame with the wider-angle 23mm, except that the 23 doesn't have a large enough image circle to accommodate the vertical shift needed to keep the vertical lines from converging. The 32 has a much larger image circle, and so stitching with it yields a wider angle of view than I could obtain with the 23 (which allows only much more limited movements). More pixels this way, too.

This is a stitched composite of two captures made from the same position, using horizontal shift movements to get a wider field of view on either side. This was really the only way to capture this building from in front of a tree that would otherwise have obstructed the facade, while also keeping its geometry undistorted. The final result is roughly the angle of view of a 14mm lens (in 35mm full frame terms), with a total of about 190 megapixels in the combined frame.

Captured with the Rodenstock 32mm/4.0 HR Digaron-W (@ f/6.3 lens, Phase One IQ4-150 back, and Phase One XT camera. Composite of two shifted images (+/- 12mm from center horizontally, -12mm vertically).

Officially, "House of the Temple, Headquarters of the Supreme Council, 33°, Ancient & Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, Southern Jurisdiction, Washington DC". The local Masonic temple, museum, library, and, I'm told, a gift shop. I was assured that no human sacrifices are performed there.

This photo was particularly influenced by two O'Keeffe paintings from her time in NYC, almost a century ago (during her Precisionist period). She lived (with Alfred Stieglitz) in the building at the far left.

See
https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/manhattan-34289

and also
https://collections.artsmia.org/art/2725/city-night-georgia-okeeffe

This image plays with the boundaries between realism and more abstract schools like Precisionism and Cubism. While it's a realistic image in the strict sense that it's a straight, basically unaltered photograph of buildings, it deliberately omits elements that might distract from the abstract lines and and shapes that make them up. The black sky (aided by the IR exposure) and harsh, almost threatening diagonal shadows add to the unreal feeling.

This was captured early afternoon on a clear day with a Rodenstock HR Digaron-W 50mm/4.0 (@ f/7.1) lens, Phase One IQ4 150 Achromatic Back (@ ISO 200) and Phase One XT camera (10mm vertical shift). 760nm IR filter, which effectively blackened the sky.

This is an abstract view of modern midtown skyscrapers, as perhaps Georgia O'Keeffe might have seen them. The composition is a nod to the Precisionist school of a century earlier, emphasizing the lines and essential geometry of the buildings.

Another bridge just to the south, named for a different NYC borough, often gets more photographic love, but I think the Manhattan Bridge deserves respect, too.

Captured with a Rodenstock 50mm/4.0 HR Digaron lens (@ f/5.0) and the Phase One IQ4-150 back, shifted vertically by 12mm.

This is a straightforward, somewhat abstract, composition, emphasizing scale and lines. It converges out of sight below the foreground pier, suggesting an infinite roadway.

I shot this several times, day and night, and the nighttime image, in which the steelwork under the bridge is closer in brightness to the sky, was much more interesting. The cloudy night helps, too.

@karlauerbach@sfba.social I’m more interested in shapes and lines than in colors.