Philadelphia Inquirer Building, Philadelphia, PA, 2017.
EXTRA! edition pixels at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/32309131520
#photography
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.
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 never actually happened.
@mattblaze@federate.social I like the distortion. It makes it look cartoonish and really works for this image.
@mattblaze@federate.social I spent many late night hours in my early teens (1980s) hanging out at a major newspaper facility (my mom often worked late in the art department) so I knew the second shift editors and press operators and how most of the place worked. The senior editors had a button near the city desk and the wire teletypes that would ring a really loud bell in the pressroom, this would notify them to stop the presses as a new front page is being prepared. If in such situations someone else was nearer the button, the editor would aways yell the line at them.
It has since been repurposed as police headquarters.
Home, no doubt, to a cigar-chomping police chief who yells things like “You’re a loose cannon, O’Hanrahan!”
@mattblaze@federate.social
@mattblaze@federate.social Given the low camera position, I think some tower perspective would have been helpful, rather than the strict rectilinear view given by the camera shift. If the image is taken from a higher point, then the rectilinear view makes sense, but from ground level it’s contrafactual in terms of perceived view.
@avogadro@well.com I think distortion from tilting the camera up is mostly a learned expectation from recent times. If you look at architectural photos from 50 or 75 years ago, when fancy cameras routinely supported movements, parallel vertical lines are almost always rendered correctly. It was only after the proliferation of small SLR and rangefinder cameras, which lack movements for correcting this, that tall buildings started tilting backwards.
My photo practice is hipster-retro in that respect.
@mattblaze@federate.social I need to learn how to do that, and I’m afraid that if I do it’ll necessitate my getting a real camera instead of my phone. I love these vertical lines you get.
@mattblaze@federate.social if you squint, you can see Superman stepping through a window in the top storey.
