73% Giza - a photo on Flickriver

73% Giza

            Scale is hard to convey in a picture, be it in printed books and newspapers, or on a screen. Unless of course it's a big screen like in the movie theaters of old, that can put you face to face with, say, a life-sized balrog. Other than that, no matter how big the real thing, to the reader it will always be just a few centimeters. I "know" that Mount Everest is almost 9 kilometers tall and the Eiffel Tower 330 meters; that the Titanic was 269 meters long, the Moon 384.000 kilometers away, the Earth weighs 6 quintillion tons and the Sun 300.000 times that. Only what does that really mean? No matter how much some author tries to convey how "fuckin' huge" something is through numbers, they're still just that. Numbers you read. Adding another zero if needed, is just the push of a key on the computer. Things looked a bit different when I first heard about the Great Pyramid. About that, people (my history teacher presumably) told me, it's about the same height as Cologne cathedral, a few meters shorter. Both measure around 150 meters from base to tip. Only, that never looked exceptionally tall to me. Taller than most things in the city, yes, and it does certainly look big when you stand in the plaza in front of it, but still. It looks big, but not "fuckin' huge".

This thing here however, this did look huge. The Müngstener Brücke, the tallest railway bridge in my country, spanning the valley of the Wupper river between Solingen and Remscheid. Comparable in age and design to the Eiffel Tower. In a way, it too is a relic from a bygone era. Much like pyramids and gothic cathedrals, nobody would build something like this today, especially not for a fairly insignificant local rail line. Railways were something like the Autobahn and the AI of the 1800s; there was indeed a railway bubble just like there was a dotcom bubble in the early 2000s. Unlike many bubbles though, the railways didn't just go away when it burst, and instead continued to benefit society in new corporate constructs. At 107 meters above the river, it's slightly more than two thirds the height of the cathedral, or the pyramid by extension, yet looking so much bigger. Maybe that's because it towers over hills rather than the city, maybe it's because it seems so light and airy when you're looking at the bridge, you see more sky than bridge. It competes with the open air, rather than the surrounding buildings.

Anyway, while exploring the area, at one point I realized, I had always pictured the pyramid as a pile of stone maybe 6 or 7 stories tall. Like when Graham Hancock told the story of how he climbed the thing (illegally) one spring equinox. Nope. It's significantly taller than the bridge. If the pyramid was placed so that it's tip was right above the middle of the bridge, I wouldn't be standing far from its base here, it would be just behind the house on the right. One could say... it's fucking huge!

Taken in: Germany / Northrhine-Westphalia / Kreisfreie Stadt Solingen / Müngsten (show map)

Taken on: December 3, 2023

Tags:

river

water

monochrome

blackandwhite

landscape

Germany

railway

railroad « less

Sets appears in: • Monochrome • Steel & Stucco

Groups appears in: • Landscape Junkies

Camera: Fujifilm X-S1, f/5.6, 1/850 sec, 7.3mm, ISO 400 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Fujifilm X-S1
Aperture:	f/5.6
Exposure Time:	0.001 sec (1/850)
Focal Length:	7.3mm
ISO:	400
Exposure Bias:	0 EV
Flash:	Off, Did not fire
Exposure Program:	Program AE
Exposure Mode:	Auto
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Color Space:	sRGB
Software:	GIMP 2.10.30
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