John Welsh Photography

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Hour 61 of this render. Four brain cells left. We have been reading DOE research reports about mine drainage chemistry. ...
07/01/2026

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%. ⛏️

minepools mininghistory Pennsylvania AMD abandonedmineland datacenters industrialheritage BeyondTheBreaker

So the question running through this whole project was a simple one. What's the point of preserving a space in 360° if n...
04/30/2026

So the question running through this whole project was a simple one. What's the point of preserving a space in 360° if nobody can actually step inside it?

Composing without a frame was the first shift. Stitching came next. The last step was making it experiential — an equirectangular file wrapped onto the inside of a sphere, rendered in a browser using Pannellum, an open-source WebGL viewer. No plugin, no install. Just a space you can navigate with a mouse.

The live embed is on the BlueCoal360 site now. The Huber's conveyor room. A building demolished in 2014. You can look up at the ceiling, down at the floor, across at machinery that no longer exists.

Final in a three-part series. Go try it.

bluecoal360.com/embedding-360-web-experience/

I've spent months in Ashley, Pennsylvania over the years — spread across many visits, a lot of time with the community, ...
04/27/2026

I've spent months in Ashley, Pennsylvania over the years — spread across many visits, a lot of time with the community, and more conversations about coal history than I ever expected to have when this started.

You go for the Huber Breaker. You stay because the place keeps producing things you weren't expecting.

This week it was Russell Johnson. Born in Ashley, 1924. Father dead of pneumonia at eight. Sent to a boarding school in Philadelphia. Held back a grade — his words, not mine.

Then 44 combat missions in a B-24 Liberator. Shot down over the Philippines. Purple Heart. GI Bill. Acting career. Three seasons as Professor Roy Hinkley on Gilligan's Island, building improbable things from whatever the jungle had available.

The Huber Breaker ran on anthracite and ingenuity in roughly equal measure. Apparently so did the people who grew up in its shadow.

johnwelshphotography.com

People tend to ask about the stitching. It sounds like the complicated part — control points, parallax, HDR brackets, ge...
04/23/2026

People tend to ask about the stitching. It sounds like the complicated part — control points, parallax, HDR brackets, geometry that bends in a spherical projection.

But it wasn't the hard part.

A full day inside the Huber. No power, no ventilation. July heat trapped in seven floors of timber and steel. I went through a lot of Gatorade and still ended up with heat stroke.

The stitching in PTGui was largely automated — because I'd done the research and testing long before I walked into that building. That's how you protect yourself in a space you can't reshoot. You front-load the preparation so the process doesn't fail you when it counts.

That's what this post covers — what stitching and retouching the BlueCoal360 archive actually involved, and why the prep mattered more than the software.

bluecoal360.com/stitching-retouching-360-image/

So the first thing 360° photography took away from me was the frame.After 40 years of instinctively knowing where the ed...
04/16/2026

So the first thing 360° photography took away from me was the frame.

After 40 years of instinctively knowing where the edges were — what's in, what's out — I had to learn a completely different way of seeing inside the Huber Coal Breaker. No dedicated 360° camera. A standard professional camera on a pano head, manually working out the angles I needed to cover the full sphere. If something existed in that space, it was going to end up in the image.

It forced a different kind of thinking before anything was set up. Not rectangles — spheres. What's the anchor point? Where does the eye land first? What ends up at the poles where distortion is worst? And what did I forget to move six feet to my left?

I wrote about that shift — the compositional thinking behind the BlueCoal360 archive, and what it actually takes to shoot HDR inside a building with no power and floors you're not entirely sure about.

First in a three-part series on the craft behind the archive.

bluecoal360.com/seeing-in-360-how-to-compose-360-image/

BlueCoal360 doesn't exist without the people who were already doing this work when I showed up in 2012.Bill Best and Ray...
04/10/2026

BlueCoal360 doesn't exist without the people who were already doing this work when I showed up in 2012.

Bill Best and Ray Clarke took me on tours of collieries across the region and walked me through the Huber floor by floor — the same path the coal traveled. Ray's wife made Irish soda bread and her own jam for us. That's the kind of people they are. Don Kane Jr. has picked up that work and carried it forward. Lately, we've been talking about something I find genuinely exciting — using the film, the 360° archive, and the 3D reconstruction as living resources for people who visit the Miners' Memorial Park in Ashley. History you can actually step inside, at the place where it happened.

The has been at this for decades. I'm glad to be working alongside them.

Chris Murley at has been essential since the beginning. He took us to the No. 9 Coal Mine in Lansford and the Lackawanna Coal Mine Tour in Scranton — and pulled out maps and documents that never make it onto the public tour. The kind of detail that changes how you understand everything above ground. That knowledge is embedded in this project.

And these three join as BlueCoal360's new partners — organizations that have been doing this work long before this project existed.

These are the partnerships that make the work honest.

Follow us here for updates. bluecoal360.com

I've spent nearly 40 years as a photographer. In all that time, I've rarely walked into a space and felt immediately tha...
04/09/2026

I've spent nearly 40 years as a photographer. In all that time, I've rarely walked into a space and felt immediately that I was looking at something that needed to be recorded before it was gone.

The Huber Coal Breaker in Ashley, Pennsylvania was one of those spaces.

I found it by accident in 2012 — driving through the Wyoming Valley and suddenly this enormous abandoned industrial structure appeared above the treeline. Seven stories of timber and steel, coal dust on every surface, machinery that hadn't moved in decades. Two years later it was gone.

That discovery led to Beyond the Breaker, my 2019 documentary on the community that fought to save it. But making that film opened a much bigger door. The more I learned about the Huber — the geology, the engineering, the immigrant labor, the industry — the more I understood that this history deserved something far more comprehensive than one film.

BlueCoal360 is the result: 22 scenes documented in 360° photography, a 3D reconstruction from the original 1939 blueprints, and a documentary that traces the complete story of Pennsylvania's anthracite coal industry.

I wrote about that original discovery and where it led.

bluecoal360.com/huber-breaker-industrial-history-of-pennsylvania/

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