New images from my daily world on the favorite, Instagram...
Hour 61 of this render. Four brain cells left. We have been reading DOE research reports about mine drainage chemistry. Send help. Or coffee. Preferably both. ☕⛏️
Here`s what happens when you archive demolished coal breakers for a living and have too much unsupervised time:
Federal researchers sampled 94 acid mine drainage treatment systems across Pennsylvania and found rare earth element concentrations of up to 2,000 mg/kg in the sludge. Pennsylvania has ~11,000 abandoned mines. ~500 of those AMD systems are accumulating REE-rich solids right now. Penn State has a working pilot facility extracting those minerals from PA mine drainage today.
These are real government-funded studies we can link you to. (Search OSTI.GOV: 2511302, 2570848, 3363370 — or see bio link.)
For context: neodymium, dysprosium, cerium — these are EV battery and wind turbine minerals. China controls most of the global supply. Pennsylvania has been treating a potential domestic source as a waste product for 60 years.
Meanwhile, data centers are moving in with the same promises the coal companies made in 1882. Draw the power. Export the value. Leave the land.
Disclaimer, very much warranted: the three DOE studies are linked and verified. Everything else we found somewhere around hour 47 of this render, when our judgment was clearly impaired. We believe it. We are also two filmmakers who have been awake too long watching a progress bar.
We`re not scientists. We`re not economists. We archive what got demolished and make films about what was lost.
But we`re paying very close attention to what comes next.
Progress bar: 68%. ⛏️
#BlueCoal360 #anthracite #NEPA #WyomingValley #rareearthelements minepools mininghistory Pennsylvania AMD abandonedmineland datacenters industrialheritage BeyondTheBreaker
Jul 1
The last step was making it something you can actually step inside.
An equirectangular file wrapped onto a sphere, rendered in a browser. The Huber`s conveyor room. A space demolished in 2014 — navigable right now: bluecoal360.com/embedding-360-web-experience/
Final in a three-part series.
#JohnWelshPhotography #360Photography #BlueCoal360 #PhotographyCraft #HuberBreaker
Apr 30
I went to Ashley for the Huber Breaker.
The place kept offering other things.
Russell Johnson — the Professor on Gilligan`s Island — was born there in 1924. Lost his father young. Sent away to school. Not a natural student. Then 44 combat missions, a Purple Heart, a GI Bill, and three seasons building radios from jungle materials on a desert island.
He wasn`t the smartest kid in Ashley. He became the smartest man on the island. Those aren`t the same thing.
Photography teaches you to wait for what the place is actually offering. You don`t always find what you went looking for.
johnwelshphotography.com
#JohnWelshPhotography #DocumentaryPhotography #AshleyPA #WyomingValley #AnthraciteHeritage #PennsylvaniaHistory #PhotographyProcess #EditorialPhotography
Apr 26
A full day inside the Huber. No power, no ventilation. July heat in seven floors of timber and steel. Went through a lot of Gatorade and still ended up with heat stroke.
That was the hard part. The stitching in PTGui was largely automated — because the research happened before I ever walked in.
Second in a three-part series on the craft behind the BlueCoal360 archive. Second in a three-part series: bluecoal360.com/stitching-retouching-360-image/
#JohnWelshPhotography #360Photography #BlueCoal360 #PhotographyCraft #HuberBreaker
Apr 23
So the first thing 360° photography took away from me was the frame.
No dedicated camera — a standard professional body on a pano head, manually calculating angles to cover the full sphere. If it existed in the space, it was in the image.
That changed how I saw every room inside the Huber. Wrote about it: bluecoal360.com/seeing-in-360-how-to-compose-360-image/
#JohnWelshPhotography #360Photography #BlueCoal360 #PhotographyCraft #IndustrialHeritage #HuberBreaker
Apr 16
BlueCoal360 doesn`t exist without the people who were already doing this work when I showed up in 2012.
Bill Best and Ray Clarke walked me through the Huber floor by floor. Ray`s wife made Irish soda bread and her own jam for us. That`s the kind of relationship this became. Don Kane has carried that work forward — and we`ve been talking about using the film, the 360° archive, and the 3D reconstruction as resources for visitors to the Miners` Memorial Park.
Chris Murley at @undergroundminers took us to the No. 9 Mine in Lansford and the Lackawanna Coal Mine Tour in Scranton — and showed us maps and documents the average tourist never sees. That insight is in this project.
These three join @epcamr as BlueCoal360`s new partners. Proud to be working alongside the Huber Breaker Preservation Society, Underground Miners, and EPCAMR. bluecoal360.com
#BlueCoal360 #HuberBreaker #AnthraciteHeritage #IndustrialHeritage #Pennsylvania
Apr 10
I found it by accident in 2012. An enormous abandoned industrial building appearing above the treeline on a road I`d never driven before. Seven stories of timber and steel. Coal dust on every surface.
The Huber Coal Breaker. Ashley, Pennsylvania. Demolished two years later.
That discovery led to Beyond the Breaker, my 2019 documentary. But making that film made me realize how much larger the story actually was.
BlueCoal360 is the comprehensive project that followed — 360° archive, 3D reconstruction, and a documentary on the full history of Pennsylvania`s anthracite coal industry.
I wrote about where it all started. Link in bio.
#JohnWelshPhotography #BlueCoal360 #Documentary #IndustrialHeritage #HuberBreaker #Pennsylvania #Photojournalism #BeyondTheBreaker
Apr 9
April 5, 2010. 11 miles from the pad. No sleep. A lot of caffeine. Fire ants.
Sixteen years ago today, I photographed STS-131 — Space Shuttle Discovery — one of the last four launches before the shuttle program ended. I knew I had one shot to get this right.
Three cameras. Each with a job. One handheld to follow the ascent. One synced via transmitter and receiver with an 800mm lens locked on the tightest possible frame. One on a timer for a long exposure at ignition. Two video cameras. A separate audio recorder. A checklist. A weather hold that aged me slightly.
The launch was flawless.
This week, I watched Artemis II lift off from my couch. Incredible. But standing 11 miles from that pad, feeling the sound arrive in your chest — there`s no streaming equivalent.
Swipe to see the setup, the wait, and the moment. 🚀
📍 Kennedy Space Center, FL
#SpaceShuttle #STS131 #NASADiscovery #SpacePhotography #Artemis #JohnWelshPhotography #ArchiveFilm #KennedySpaceCenter #Philadelphia #DocumentaryPhotography
Apr 5
Instagram images by John Welsh, Photographer & Filmmaker
John Welsh is a Philadelphia-based photographer and filmmaker whose work spans editorial, documentary, portrait, and commercial photography. Catch up on the latest news from current projects, or visit Rare Light Media — a director-led production studio creating cinematic visual content for organizations, institutions, and artists.