Piero Bosio Social Web Site Personale

@petrillic And they are welcome to Complain to the Manager.

So far tonight I've been yelled at for

- posting a photo of a 90 year old university building (and failing discuss affordable housing for some reason)

- openly discussing the security of elections, a nuanced topic that is a main focus of my work.

Tough crowd.

Pi day is an irrational holiday that was invented by Big US Date Format.

@ChuckMcManis The angles are a monster. None of the lines are actually vertical.

I really like the concept (and execution here) of a secular cathedral. It satisfies our urge to build great monuments without the requirement to accept any particular dogma.

Captured with the Rodenstock 50mm Digaron lens and about 13mm of vertical shift to maintain the geometry (but several architectural features - setbacks and tapers in the building design - still make it appear to converge toward the top).

Pittsburgh's 42 story "Cathedral of Learning" houses offices and classrooms for the University of Pittsburgh. Completed in 1937, it took 11 years to construct. It remains the tallest academic building in the US.

The lobby is also gorgeous, and worth a visit.

Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh, 2023.

All the pixels, learning optional, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/52977939495/

#photography

@thereisnocat 6950 seems to have gone off the air. Getting 6944 here now, with a pretty decent signal.

@x0 right, AM with independent sidebands. Demodulates as mono on a regular receiver

@x0 you can do AM stereo with different channels on the upper and lower sidebands. But only the pirates seem to actually do this.

Radio nerditry: looking like another active weekend for shortwave pirate broadcasts. Stations audible in DC right now on 6950 AM (stereo!) and 6960 AM.

@EricCarroll thanks!

Captured on a short hike with a small mirrorless camera, 35mm lens, lightweight tripod, and enough neutral density for a roughly 30 second exposure.

Flowing water is a subject that lends itself to motion studies that reveal what our unaided eye can't see, controlled by exposure time. At 1/3000 sec, every drop of water freezes in place. At 30 seconds, we see smooth, cloud-like structures that obscure individual perturbations. Only at around 1/30 sec does the camera see what we do.

Tanner Creek, OR, 2011.

All the pixels, with no risk of getting wet, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/5892599507

#photography

So this was mostly a play on the concept of "street photography". The street is the literal subject, but everything about it - the absence of people or any depiction of street life, the use of a heavy, tripod-laden camera, the compositional formality - defies the conventions of that genre.

This is a high resolution stitch of three captures with the Rodenstock 32mm/4.0 HR Digaron lens, yielding a 230 MP image with roughly the angle of view of a 14mm "full frame" rectilinear lens. The high resolution invites you to look closely for signs of life, but they remain elusive.

While this is literally a photo of the street, it's not a "street photo" at all. The empty nocturnal streetscape is completely devoid of life and human activity, though it hints at sometimes being a bustling place.

2AM, Adams-Morgan, Washington, DC, 2023.

All the pixels, none of which have representation in Congress, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/52991590112

#photography

If you're doing architectural or cityscape photography, it's helpful to have a working understanding of zero, one, two, and three point perspective (normally taught to draftspeople, illustrators and painters).

This photo is an example of (mostly) one point perspective (depth), and I was mostly thinking of Vermeer's Little Street when I composed it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Street

Union Square West between 16th and 17th Streets in Manhattan is home to five distinctive and variously historically significant narrow mid-rise buildings.

The quirky Decker Building (2nd from left, at 33 Union Square West) is now chiefly residential with a retail ground floor storefront. From 1967-1973 the building housed Andy Warhol's "Factory" studio, where, in 1968, he was famously and nearly fatally shot by an irate Valarie Solanas. The neighborhood was more colorful back then.

Captured with the Rodenstock 32mm/4.0 Digaron-W lens (@ f/6.3), Phase One XT IQ4-150 camera. 12mm vertical shift to maintain geometry.

This is a straightforward head-on single point perspective view of the facades of the varied buildings on this block just after sunrise. It took some time to line up the camera to be parallel to the faces of the buildings, once again making architectural photography be something of an exercise in surveying.