Reach out to us
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
**For inquiries related to your personalized link, please reach out here,
CMC Steel Plant
Overview
Photographing the decommissioned CMC Steel plant in Rancho Cucamonga meant spending ten months inside a place that felt frozen mid-thought. Coffee cups still on desks. Tools on workbenches. The scale of the facility matched only by its silence.
The work was fine art, not documentation. Shot exclusively in black and white using the Phase One IQ4 150 Achromatic — a camera purpose-built to render tone, texture, and the interplay of light and shadow with 151 megapixels of monochromatic precision.
The work was fine art, not documentation. Shot exclusively in black and white using the Phase One IQ4 150 Achromatic — a camera purpose-built to render tone, texture, and the interplay of light and shadow with 151 megapixels of monochromatic precision.
Type
Fine Art & Industrial Photography
Location
Rancho Cucamonga, CA
The workers had just stepped away. The images knew it.
A world frozen mid-sentence.
Each visit revealed something new. The plant didn't change — its character did. The changing light, the advancing demolition around its edges, the slow transformation of a living facility into a relic. My role was to be a chronicler of that metamorphosis, not to intervene in it.
Sepia toning came later in post. The decision wasn't aesthetic nostalgia — it was structural. The warm tones emphasized what the environment already communicated: something preserved, and something passing.
Sepia toning came later in post. The decision wasn't aesthetic nostalgia — it was structural. The warm tones emphasized what the environment already communicated: something preserved, and something passing.
151 megapixels. Zero color.
The Phase One IQ4 150 Achromatic Digital Back was the only tool for this project. Removing the Bayer filter entirely — the mechanism that introduces color to a sensor — means the Achromatic resolves light with nothing in the way. Every texture in corroded steel, every gradation in concrete shadow, rendered without interpretation.
Five-minute exposures were part of the process. Automated frame averaging. The camera doing what the eye cannot — integrating time itself into a single frame, smoothing the ambient shift of light across an interior that hadn't been lit for production in years.
Five-minute exposures were part of the process. Automated frame averaging. The camera doing what the eye cannot — integrating time itself into a single frame, smoothing the ambient shift of light across an interior that hadn't been lit for production in years.
Over ten months, the plant finished its transformation. The physical structure came down in stages. What these images hold is what that process looked like before it was complete — the facility at its most itself, in the interval between use and erasure. That window doesn't reopen.
.gif)
