Cathedral

Posted by Russ Devan (New Hanover, United States) on 29 May 2008 in Architecture and Portfolio.

Actually, this is the ruins of an old carpentry shop at the former Lockridge Furnace in Alburtis, Pennsylvania. Lockridge Furnace was the site of the former Lock Ridge Iron Works that was built in 1868. Eventually becoming obsolete, the iron works were closed and largely dismantled in 1921. The old masonry buildings were left to decay over the years. The furnace complex, which contains the ruins of many of the old stone buildings was eventually donated to Lehigh Country for use as a park.

I first photographed Lock Ridge Furnace a few weeks ago with some friends. We were hoping for heavy fog conditions that morning, which would have given the ruins a very eery and mysterious look. Unfortunately, the sky was heavily overcast that morning and no fog was present, resulting in less than optimal lighting conditions. Needless to say, my resulting images were very uninspiring. Looking for a way to better convey the old and mysterious feel of the ruins, I decided to use the technique called Painting With Light, which I will credit my friend Betsy for suggesting. An excellent example of light painting can be seen in the June 2008 issue of National Geographic, which was used to photograph Stonehenge.

I returned to Lock Ridge a few weeks later to use this technique. The resulting image you see was illuminated solely with two flashlights. I used one large flashlight with a broad light beam to paint 90 percent of the structure. I then used a second flashlight with an adjustable beam that I could focus down to add accents and additional illumination to certain areas of the structure. I chose flashlights with traditional tungsten lightbulbs to give the structure a golden tone to make it "glow" in the night and give it a more mysterious appearance. LED flashlights produce a white or bluish light and would not produce the results I desired.

Some of the challenges of shooting this at night were obviously trying not to trip over the uneven ground and trying to focus the camera in the dark. I overcame the focusing problem by shining the flashlight on the structure with one hand, then activating the camera's autofocus with the other hand until I heard the confimatory "beep" that told me it was in focus (the autofocus on DSLRs is the passive type and requires a certain amount of light to work). I also found it somewhat difficult to compose the image in near total darkness. To make sure the entire structure was in the frame, I highlighted the corners with the flashlight and checked in the viewfinder to see if I could see the light where it was aimed. If I couldn't, I had to adjust the composition. Believe it or not, the other challenge was trying to find my camera and tripod as I walked back from lighting the structure once the exposure was completed. Both the camera and tripod are black and were setup in a wooded area so many times it was impossible to see them until I was almost on top of it. I couldn't turn on the flashlight to find it because I would risk ruining the exposure because the shutter was still open.

Even though this is an old carpentry shop, I chose the title "Cathedral" after the Crosby Stills and Nash song by the same name, which I was listening to on my iPod as I processed this image. The mysterious mood of that song fit perfectly with the mysteriousness of the image.

"The Master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both."
- Zen Buddhist Text

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