Few photographs I've taken have generated more interest, more feedback, or more questions than this one. Here I'm going to take the opportunity to provide some information, and answer some questions, about the location - and the photograph.
Few photographs I've taken have generated more interest, more feedback, or more questions than this one. Here I'm going to take the opportunity to provide some information, and answer some questions, about the location - and the photograph.
Phalen Creek was once just that, a creek, that emptied into the Mississippi river after flowing thru Saint Paul's Swede Hollow neighborhood on it's way from the Lake Phalen area. In the late 1800's, the wetlands around the mouth of Phalen Creek were filled in, and the rest of the creek was buried to create a railroad right-of-way into downtown. As was common for the area at the time, the water-management capacity of the creek was retained by diverting the flow into a ridiculously oversized tunnel capable of serving as a storm sewer during even severe storm events.
In places the drain stands twenty-two feet high (or deep, depending on one's perspective). When it's not raining, the tunnel carries the flow of Phalen Creek, as well as groundwater and the product of numerous springs, a total of just a few inches of water. The result is a large, mostly empty drain - the perfect place for urban explorers to poke around, and a great destination for creative photographers. The obligatory hypocrite warning goes here - you really shouldn't go in storm sewers. Yes, it's generally trespassing. I think photographs like this justify the means it takes to get them, but that doesn't mean you should do what I do.
Storm drains are a pretty constant temperature year-round, around 45 degrees, and don't really smell bad. They're often a little musty, but methane and other hazardous gases are rarely a problem. The Phalen Creek tunnel has such good airflow that it's actually windy; keeping candles lit can be a challenge. Normally, the drain, like all storm sewers, is absolutely pitch-black; the only time it's lit as seen in the photograph here is when someone does so for a photograph. I know, it's really awesome to think there's a "Keeper of the Candles" or somesuch, whose job is to keep the sewers well-lit, but it's not the case. We buy the tea candles (in bulk), we put them in place, we light them, and we take them away when we're done, in keeping with the mantra "take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints". Even with a couple people, setting up a photo like this can take over an hour, and cleaning up afterwards almost as long, as you have to wait for the candles to cool before you remove them - unless you like hot wax all over everything.
This is the most picturesque part of the Phalen Creek drain, an arched, twenty-foot high section over a hundred yards long, built of huge limestone blocks, and with a brick floor. It was photographed one night in 2003 on Fuji Sensia 100, a slow-speed color negative film, in a tripod-mounted 6x6cm Kiev-60, with the normal 80mm, f/2.8 lens (equivelant, more-or-less, to a 50mm lens on a 35mm camera), at an aperture of f/5.6 and an exposure of several minutes. Once your eyes have had time to adjust, two-hundred candles is plenty of light to see by; except for the blur of the moving water, this photo is pretty close to what you'd see if you were really there. Candlelight is far from being full-spectrum or anything like "white" light, but the human eye is very adaptable. Color-negative films are much better suited to candlelight than transparency (slide) films, which record everything as red or yellowish-orange, depending on the composition of the candle. Other than a little cropping and color-balancing, this image is unmanipulated; this isn't a Photoshop creation, or a digital rendering, but a real photograph, taken without any filtration or other tricks.