Fire Call Box
23 November 2014 -- 327/365
Providence, Rhode Island
There are several relics of our not-so-distant past that, while now obsolete, may still be found if one looks hard enough. Phone booths are all but non-existent in the US, thanks to the rapid adoption of the cell phone. Mailboxes once stood in every neighborhood, and smaller mail-slots were attached to telephone poles along main roads. The latter are all gone, and the larger mailboxes are now few and far between. Fire call boxes, as seen in today's photo, were once located at regular intervals throughout the city. They, too, fell victim to cell phones and the adoption of the 911 emergency call system. In this case, though, it appears that progress is not always an improvement. There was a local example a few weeks ago where both 911 and a fire call box were used to report the same fire by two college students standing next to each other. The fire box won the race. It turns out, those few boxes that still remain (and still work) are directly connected to Fire Dispatch, so pushing the button on the box immediately alerts Dispatch to the location of the call. The 911 system, on the other hand, requires human interaction and, since it's used for Police, Fire, and Rescue simultaneously, it creates by necessity a slower initial response. As VOIP (voice over IP) becomes increasingly popular in the home, even the 911 system is threatened since VOIP does not provide the location identification needed by the system. It's an interesting dilemma, since VOIP is a very low-cost solution and is increasingly attractive to anyone still maintaining a landline.
Post processing started with a classic filter in Topaz B&W FX. I adjusted color sensitivity sliders, adaptive exposure, regions, contrast, boost black, boost white, and protect highlights. A levels adjustment was added in PSE. Note that the photo was taken using a 200mm lens at f/2.8 so as to produce the very narrow depth of field and extreme background blur you see here. The background was very distracting, so it was necessary to eliminate it in this fashion.
A well captured image, with a thought-provoking narrative. The age of the object is immediately obvious, yet it also seems responsibly reliable. I wonder what all that chalk markings on the side means?
