June, 2017 - RevuAIR

CSS Tennessee Brooke Rifles

By fStop Fitzgerald | 25 June 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

The Confederate ironclad Tennessee was effectively armed with a concentrated and powerful armament of two 7-inch Brooke double-banded rifles fore and aft on pivot mounts and four 6.4-inch Brooke double-banded rifles, two per broadside.

The 7-inch rifles, weighing 15,300 pounds each, were manufactured in Selma, Alabama. This, the bow gun, tube no. S-10, is property of the Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC) and located at the Washington Navy Yard in Washington, DC. Its companion tube, no. S-5 at the stern pivot, is also the property of NHHC, is on loan and on display outside the Selma City Hall. In the background, the three visible guns are from Tennessee’s four-gun broadside battery.

This gun is one of the four 9,000 pound 6.4-inch broadside rifles, three of which are also at NHHC in Washington. It was forged at the Tredegar Ironworks in Richmond, Virginia.

This illustration shows the guns mounts. The pivot guns were mounted on large sliding carriages and the broadside guns on two-wheel Marsilly carriages.

CSS Tennessee

By fStop Fitzgerald | 25 June 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

Making Sausage: You Really Don’t Want to Know

This is an incomplete project. Although portions of it were published in the December 2009 issue of Naval History magazine, they were carefully cropped to eliminate errors that exist because of lack of documentation and skill on my part. My goal is to do the definitive model with accurate interior detail.

I am posting this to ping the greater world for more information so that I can properly detail the interior and fix the exterior, and perhaps rework the whole drawing. These renders are eight years old, so my skills have improved, but until I get more information this will sit on a back burner.

For the hull and casemate, I was only able to find these two drawings.

I do not have my sources readily at hand, but the profile and plan are obviously from a book. They are small and while apparently detailed, it is all lost in the small reproduction on poor absorbent paper. I believe the sections are from a different source. They are larger and cleaner, a big help.

The only way to approach a subject is to envision it in the simplest parts possible to keep your drawing time to a minimum. One fortunate aspect of ships (along with aircraft) is that you generally only have to do 50 percent of the project because of symmetry along the centerline. You simply copy, paste, reflect, and merge your work. With Tennessee, I created three basic pieces; the hull, hull armor, and casemate. Everything else is detail.

Using Illustrator, I created the lines for each. This is not a difficult process, but is somewhat challenging in trying to visualize your 2-dimensional work in 3-dimensions. Once those are complete, I import them into my 3-D software, Strata 3D, and proceed to extrude, lathe, hull, and whatever else needs to be done to get something that resembles Tennessee.

The hull sections, as noted, were clean and easy to reconstruct.

Once drawn, they were laid out in position along the length of the hull for “erecting” in the 3D program.

The failings of the hull—primarily because of my inexperience—is the plating. The interior, however, is another matter. Despite their size, the interior plan was really quite good for its level of detail. It allowed for proper positioning of the guns and their interaction. The funnel drops down through the gun deck to the engine room below. The capstan has an interesting position, but again, its linkages, unless below deck, are non-existent.

But details of the interior are sorely lacking. The gun handling fixtures are pretty much standard, so those details were easily added. But the real issue is the wheel stand and its workings. The drawings show that it was elevated above the gun deck and hung from the overhead, but how? How was the wheel linked to the rudder? What navigational equipment was associated with it? How did they use a compass surrounded by all that iron? Many questions, no answers. So the wheel is just suspended over the deck.

I added a drawing to illustrate the composite laminated construction of the casemate armor. It’s interesting to see how the laminations go together and how thick the armor was in relation to its backing.

I don’t normally share rejects. The faults in this are obvious, but it is here because it shows relationships and details, especially in the overhead grating, not visible in the others.The overhead view shows the layout of the fore (right) and aft 7-inch Brooke double-banded rifles on swivel mounts. These align with the three fore- and aft-most gunports. The four 6.4-inch Brooke double-banded rifles occupy the four broadside ports.

These are some other interior views as well as the overall fore and aft views.

Again, if you can help by pointing me toward drawings that will get this closer to what it should be, please let me know.

…Her Name is Sal…

By fStop Fitzgerald | 19 June 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

Some photographs from one of my favorite museums

The Erie Canal Museum in Syracuse, New York, is arguably the centerpiece of a state-wide program centered around the historic Erie Canal. The museum is housed in the Weighlock Building built in 1850 to weigh canal boats to determine their tolls. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is the sole survivor of seven on the canal system. As its name indicates, it consisted of a lock, which when drained would lower the boat onto a set of scales. The boat’s annual empty registered weight was subtracted from the Weighlock weight to determine the weight of its freight.

The Greek Revival style building was used for 74 years as a state office building after tolls were abolished in 1883. In 1957 it was slated for demolition, but saved by citizens interested in the building and the canal’s history.

In its present form, the majority of the formerly open but covered lock is now enclosed in glass panels and houses a full-size canal boat, which visitors can board. These images do not give the full breadth of the museum’s displays. Each aspect of the canal from its inception and first plans, to the surveys, to excavation, to impact on the nation are all (and more) graphically represented.

Photography as Photography

By fStop Fitzgerald | 18 June 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

Thoughts on viewing a photographic exhibit at the Everson Museum of Art

First off, so you know where I am coming from, I have been a professional photojournalist for more than 40 years. That means I’ve gotten my hands wet with chemicals, mixed my own chemistry, got really sick from licking a ferrocyanide brush, and placed the Hand of God between many an enlarger lens and print-to-be. I’ve had six years of college education in photography and journalism, and another ten years or so apprenticeship under some of the world’s greatest unknown photographers.

My photography has always been nuts and bolts. Four to six assignments a day, and at times many more, spot news when it happens and all with a deadline looming overhead. Call it photography’s version of meatball surgery. So although I had six years of learning, working, and honing the niceties of the craft (operative term), my profession called for a lot of short circuits to deliver a photograph to the daily doorstep. Fact: some negatives lasted no longer than the first printing. They were processed so fast that the first exposure to enlarger light killed them.

All this is a long way of saying I know a little bit about photography.

My slice of photography is recording the moment. It is not the “moment” that high cotton photojournalists describe and write books about. My moments are that 1/125th of a second of someone’s life and the 30-second exposure of a snippet of a city’s life. At Syracuse, my fellow neophyte shooters would discuss their “style.” We would talk of the masters—Cartier-Bresson, Weston, Eisenstadt, Stieglitz, Smith, Lange, Capa, Feininger, Adams (Ansel, not Eddie), Cunningham, Penn, and the then young guns such as Mark, Erwitt, Winogrand, Warhol, and many others. After six years, I left school with no style in hand. I was a loss. So I went to work. It was only after about five years I discovered I did indeed have a style, but it wasn’t quite a style. It was a philosophy.

I came to have a deep rooted faith in the camera as a tool to provide the single most important, accurate, and—if you will—perfect record of a specific instant in time. Regretfully—very regretfully—I now have to include the phrase “in the hands of an ethical person” to this belief. When that shutter clicks (or used to) everything within the four walls of the (then) film frame were captured for all eternity (if the black-and-white film was properly processed). As a photographer, I was an instant historian. Over time I came to see that in everybody’s photography, not just those of us who were paid for having the fun and excitement of that process. Indeed, as a columnist, my mantra was for everyone to dig out their shoebox archives—for that was the storage medium of choice for negatives and prints—and preserve and share them with family members to identify as fully as possible names, locations, and situations. With the passing of each generation, those very salient pieces of information so critical to the significance of the image are lost forever.

The bottom line of all this is photography is an art and a craft. It is very much akin to baking. A negative needed to be exposed to a specific amount of light for optimum image capture. It then needed to be processed at a critical temperature for an exact amount of time to have that image properly developed. It further required critical steps for “fixing” the image against further light exposure and its permanent preservation. Similarly, the print required the same critical steps. Any deviation from time and temperature resulted in a less than optimum image, which is readily apparent to one who has walked the walk.

So this distills to an image that looks like what the photographer saw.

This brings me to an exhibit I saw this past weekend at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York. This is not to be seen as a condemnation of the Everson or the artist. Just an observation on my failing to understand the artist’s communication.

This is the display. It is an amalgam of numerous photographs, approximately 150, on an approximately 62 1/2-feet long, by about 18- to 20-feet tall wall. Each of the prints was about 5×7 inches.

As individual images, there was no craftsmanship displayed. The image quality was poor, at best. There was no evidence of individual treatment. Most of those that I could see—for it was absolutely impossible to view those that were mounted more than eight feet or so above the floor—were snapshots; i.e., they had no discernible composition or point of focus. Subject matter was all over the map: a wine rack, a shop front, a pair of nude men, footprints in sand, dirt. There were groupings of two, three, or more images, again with no seeming relationship.

The artist also appeared to have little care for his/her presentation as image borders were not completely trimmed (see red box).

Art is a tremendously important and effective means of communication. That process, however, to be successful, has five basic elements: the sender, the message, the medium for transmission of the message, a recipient, and feedback from the recipient to the sender. The lack of any one means communication has not occurred.

This is a failed communication. What is the message? We can identify the sender (artist), medium (photographs pasted on a wall), recipient (museum visitors). Feedback is also easily determined—what the hell am I looking at? And why am I looking at it?

Not as Advertised

By fStop Fitzgerald | 10 June 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

When is the Battle of Midway NOT the Battle of Midway?

Research is everything. Your output, no matter what the format—words, painting, oratory, conversation, whatever—is wholly dependent upon those nuggets of information it stands on.

Assume you know nothing about the battle, which was remembered just last week on the 75th anniversary. You go to a “primary” web site, such as the Navy’s own Naval History and Heritage Command. (https://www.history.navy.mil/) This is official Navy. It is their history site. On it you will find many original documents and images from throughout the Navy’s nearly 250 year history. It is a great resource. [ed. note: I am employed by NHHC and thus am not an impartial source.]

A search for the site for “Battle of Midway” results in some 963 hits. The fourth entry is this painting by Rodolfo Claudus. Its title, by the artist, is officially “Battle of Midway, 3 June 1942.” And that is where the rub is. Nothing about the battle as depicted by the artist is correct. It is not inaccurate, it is flat wrong.

First, take the title. Most historians—and in particular, the U.S. Navy—deem the battle as spanning from 4 to 7 June 1942. On 3 June, a PBY patrol plane spotted the occupation force, not the main force including the carriers as reported. Nine Army Air Force B-17s launched from Midway to attack the fleet. After three hours of flight they found the transports some 660 miles from their base. Battling through heavy antiaircraft fire, they dropped their bombs and claimed four hits. In fact, they inflicted no damage. This attack, solely by the Army, on the transport force was the only combat on 3 June.

This segues into the content of the painting. There are four elements and one action.

The actions shows a carrier in combat. Nothing like this occurred on 3 June.

The primary element is an aircraft carrier. The artist has done a credible likeness of an Essex (CV-9)-class carrier, in particular the long-hull variant. Now the “howevers” begin . . .

The first and name-ship of the Essex class was not commissioned until December 1942, so obviously, none of the class fought at Midway. The artist does mark the ship with the number 10 on the funnel, indicating CV-10, USS Yorktown. That would be appropriate . . . if . . . that was the right Yorktown. The Yorktown at Midway was CV-5, which was badly damaged on 4 June and sunk on 6 June. Another relatively minor point, but a factual error nevertheless, CV-10 was a short-hull Essex, not long-hull.

The next most prominent element is the Japanese aircraft. There is little to quibble here except, of course, that none were shot down on 3 June.

The third element, to the left, is a destroyer. The artist has depicted either an Allen M. Sumner (DD-692)- or Gearing (DD-710)-class ship. In either case, the very first of these ships was not laid down until July 1943. They didn’t exist at the time of the battle.

The final element is a battleship to the right shrouded in mist or haze. Unlike the other two ships, this is a bit less specific, however, its length, shape of the bow, and closely spaced, tall thin stacks favor the North Carolina (BB-55) class over the Iowa (BB-61). It is definitely not meant to be a single-stack South Dakota (BB-57) or any of the pre-war battleships. Once again, in any case, this element is moot. No U.S. battleships were anywhere near Midway and none participated in the battle.

So, what you have here is a painting that in every element has no relation (except perhaps ships at sea, in combat, with aircraft) to its title.

Sadly, it must be filed under its official title, hence, misleading the unknowing.

Everything hinges on the caption, and the one provided is of no help. It gives the painting as c.1950, yet in the artist’s hand it is labelled 1956.

Bottom line—question everything. Even these comments.