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Argentine Pass Trailhead Mining Tipple, Summit, Co., Colorado, July 21, 2024
Located a stone’s throw from the Argentine Pass trailhead in Summit County, Colorado, this tipple, a typical ore loading station, is, though abandoned, in comparatively good repair and on this day with dramatic clouds behind, a tempting subject for my Plaubel Pro-Shift medium format camera.
There are few roll film cameras that can do what this camera does, which is to maintain a structure’s vertical line parallelism while pointed upward from a plumb (vertical) line. That’s a mouthful to understand, so I will explain further. Ordinary cameras, when pointed upward, create convergence of vertical lines in buildings which is often visually disturbing. The human brain makes adjustments for vertical line convergence in structures when looking up–the brain “knows” the structure’s vertical lines are parallel, but cameras do not. The issue of vertical line convergence is especially pronounced with wide angle lenses, creating a visual perception that the structure is falling over backwards. Though this tipple’s supporting posts are bent at the bottom, the majority of the structure is properly rendered on film with the use of the Plaubel camera.
The function of this structure is evident. Extracted ore cars are rolled down the hillside from the mine portal to the end of the tipple’s top level at which point the ore is dumped through the funnel at the bottom into waiting trucks or wagons to be transported for processing. Without a tipple, the effort involved in loading extracted ore into trucks or horse-drawn wagons from steep hillsides would be time-consuming, inefficient, and very dangerous.
The Plaubel’s 47mm f5.6 Schneider Super Angulon lens is permanently affixed to the camera, but it can be shifted on the camera body to maintain parallelism of vertical structural lines. There are few other roll film cameras that can match the versatility of this photographic instrument.