- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
“Pennsylvania Avenue Subway” Tunnel (Former Reading Railroad), Philadelphia, 2004.
#photography
“Pennsylvania Avenue Subway” Tunnel (Former Reading Railroad), Philadelphia, 2004.
#photography
Captured with a Fuji GX680 camera, 80mm lens, T-Max 100 film. Some tilt was applied to control focus. It was very dark in there, and focusing required the use of a flashlight.
The Pennsylvania Avenue Subway was built to provide a sub-grade freight connection between the Reading Railroad’s main line and its “City Branch”. It served the Baldwin Locomotive Works’ Callowhill plant and, later, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s printing plant, among other Center City industries. Abandoned in the 1980’s.
The GX680 was a fun but very unusual camera that couldn’t quite decide what it wanted to be. It was a truly gigantic beast of a medium format SLR camera providing (limited) view camera movements. It used 120-format roll film with a 6x8cm frame (so a 3:4 aspect ratio), with a built-in autowinder. It’s sort of what you’d get if you somehow merged a Nikon F4, a Hasselblad, and a Crown Graphic. Definitely not a point & shoot camera.
Fun fact: the Reading was a major northeastern US railroad (made famous internationally by its place on the Monopoly gameboard), which ceded its rail business in 1976 to the newly formed Conrail consortium. But the company kept most of its non-railroad real estate holdings, and today mostly operates cinemas (including NYC’s Angelika) in several countries
(The Reading company was named after the Pennsylvania city, and so is pronounced to include the past tense of what you do with words on a page, not the present tense).
@[email protected] Exactly the same as Reading, Berkshire, so I suppose it is just copied. The etymology of the original name is a tribe name, Readingas, meaning in Old Saxon “the people of the Red [one]”.
@[email protected]
Do you have the negative at hand? What is it’s actual size in mm?
FWIW, the '85 Hasselblad 500CM here is 53x53mm, the '53 Rolleiflex T is 54x54 mm, and the no longer here Mamiya 7II was a seriously glorious 54x70 mm.
Although I’ve never used a GX680, I was photographed by one once (they were standard for wedding/family studio group photos here in Japan in the good old days).