John Welsh Photography

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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/

Read something this morning that stopped me.AP reported that retired coal miners in Datong, China are watching their old...
04/07/2026

Read something this morning that stopped me.

AP reported that retired coal miners in Datong, China are watching their old mine become a museum. One of them walks the street near the locked school hoping tourists will stop for noodles. He said the place used to be crowded. "Now the bustling scenes have gone."

I've heard almost that exact sentence. Different accent. Different zip code. Same weight.

Nearly 40 years with a camera, and the story I keep coming back to is this one — what a community carries when the thing that built it disappears. It's not nostalgia. It's something harder than that.

The Huber Coal Breaker. Ashley, Pennsylvania. BlueCoal360.

Follow us here for updates.

Sixteen years ago today — April 5, 2010 — I photographed Space Shuttle Discovery launch STS-131, one of the last four sh...
04/05/2026

Sixteen years ago today — April 5, 2010 — I photographed Space Shuttle Discovery launch STS-131, one of the last four shuttle launches before the program ended.

I camped 11 miles from the pad — stealthily, with fire ants — to get the best vantage point. Three cameras, each with a specific assignment: one handheld to follow the ascent, one synced via transmitter and receiver with an 800mm lens, one on a timer trigger for a long exposure at ignition. Two video cameras. A separate audio recorder. No sleep. A lot of caffeine. One weather hold during the countdown.

The launch was flawless.

This week I watched Artemis II launch on TV. It brought it all back. But watching on a screen and standing 11 miles from the pad feeling the sound hit you — not the same thing. Not even close. 📸🚀

Last night's Artemis launch took me back to one of my favorite mornings behind a camera.April 2010. Indian River banks, ...
04/02/2026

Last night's Artemis launch took me back to one of my favorite mornings behind a camera.
April 2010. Indian River banks, Titusville, Florida. I was there to photograph STS-131 — one of the final Space Shuttle launches. Set up before dawn, waiting, the way you do.
The launch was magnificent. But the photograph that still moves me wasn't of the shuttle clearing the pad.
Afterward, almost everyone left. The ones who stayed were me and a small group of British travelers — they'd come straight from a wedding, hadn't slept, and were still in their formal wear. We were all packing up when someone looked up and just said, "look at that."
The v***r trails from the launch were catching the rising sun. The light was refracting through them in a way I've never seen before or since. I grabbed my camera and made some of the most quietly beautiful images of my career.
I came across those photos recently while updating my website and online presence for some new projects. Fifteen years. Still stunning.
Last night felt like things coming full circle. And yes, my AI collaborator and I have been building some fairly impressive workflows lately and were feeling pretty good about ourselves. Until I heard the commentator say the Artemis computers had just taken over the flight.
I showed him the photo. He saw it. No clever response. Just silence.
Nearly 40 years with a camera. The sky still wins. 😄📸

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03/02/2026

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