Walking the abandoned Rochester subway (photo gallery) August 24, 2008
Posted by tcbp in : Photography , trackbackYesterday I finally walked the length of the abandoned subway in Rochester from the west end all the way to the exit under Dinosaur BBQ. It was a pretty warm day but other than the dusty and sometimes smelly air, the subway was cooler and more comfortable than walking along above the streets.
From the west entrance to the east entrance the subway is over a mile long, and runs under Broad Street for a good deal of the distance but also passes under the Gannett building and the Library. Much of the subway is completely pitch black and the only light is from what we brought with us. By the time we reached the Broad Street bridge we had been in the subway for a little over an hour and were surprised to come upon a pretty big group of people. They were a group of martial artists and they were filming scenes for some martial arts movie.
Check after the jump to read more about the trip and see the photos
Most of the shots were taken either with available light or with my Petzl Myo XP (Belt version with remote battery pack) or my 4 D-cell Maglite with the Malkoff Devices LED dropin mod. This was my first time using the Malkoff modded Maglite as a source for taking photos but its more natural appearing color temperature (6500K) seems to make it much nicer for photography than other LED flashlights I’ve used. The image below is an example of one lit by the Maglite.
I used my Rebel XTi and Sigma 30 1.4. This is my second 30 1.4, the first one had a lot of focus issues. So far this one seems to focus well and is quite sharp. You won’t be able to tell much of that from these shots though since they’re all handheld and many are just meant to record some of the graffiti I found interesting.
When we reached the end of the tunnel under Dinosaur BBQ we saw a large amount of dust at the opening from the road work on Court St. above. The dust (below) looked pretty neat with the way the light came in to the tunnel so we took some shots of it before talking to one of the construction workers who was in the tunnel.
Unfortunately all of my images of the east entrance (where the dust was) were lost to some sort of glitch (I think with the memory card) but I was able to recover them all using Zero Assumption Recovery which seems to be a very effective and free program for recovering lost or deleted files. Since I’ve never been impressed with the mostly useless recovery program provided by Sandisk with some of their memory cards, I’m glad I found this program.
Check out the gallery below for all the pictures from the trip.
Comments»
Nice shots, Carl!