Camera: Kodak EasyShare Z1485 IS.
In the distance, the Tower at PNC Plaza looms over the next block.
-
Lower Fifth Avenue
-
Fidelity Building
If you love architecture, Fourth Avenue gives you a more varied aesthetic experience per block than any other street in the city. Here we have the Richardsonian Romanesque style as it applies to a proto-skyscraper: the Fidelity Building, designed by James T. Steen. It opened in 1889, when Richardson’s courthouse on Grant Street was brand new. Its seven floors are close to the limit for pre-steel-cage architecture. Only a year after this building opened, construction began on the Conestoga Building on Smithfield Street, the first steel-cage building in Pittsburgh.
The photograph is huge, by the way: at full size it’s 8.88 megabytes, so don’t click on it on a metered connection. Once again, old Pa Pitt has put it together from multiple photographs, which was the only way to get the whole front of the building from across the street.
-
Four Gateway Center
A 1960 skyscraper by the prolific Harrison & Abramovitz (who also gave us the U. S. Steel Tower, the Westinghouse Building, and the Alcoa Building). Father Pitt thinks it looks better as an architect’s rendering than in person. He has therefore made his photograph (merged from three separate photographs) look as much like an architect’s rendering as possible.
-
Downtown from the Thirty-First Street Bridge
A grey day, and the U. S. Steel Tower has its head in the clouds, as it often has. Below we see the frozen back channel of the Allegheny at Herr’s Island (or Washington’s Landing).
Camera: Olympus E-20n.
-
Your Downtown Panorama of the Day
This time without falling snow. The one above, made from eighteen separate photographs, is quite large (about 37 million pixels), so don’t click on it on a metered connection. It’s the largest stitched picture old Pa Pitt has made to date, but Hugin handled it perfectly and automatically. The picture below is a more manageable size.
Camera: Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z3.
-
It’s Snowing Downtown
Camera: Kodak EasyShare Z1485 IS.
And here’s the proof. Note the ice on the Monongahela, except for a channel wide enough for barge trains.
Camera: Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z3.
-
Playing with Hugin, the Panorama Stitcher
Continuing his experiments with panorama stitching, Father Pitt is trying out a program called Hugin. The results are encouraging. All the pictures in this article were stitched together with the default settings and no tweaking at all.
Here’s a picture put together from two separate photos:
This is extraordinarily good work, because the original pictures did not match very well at all. They were taken hand-held, and the exposure is very different. Here they are, and you may judge Hugin’s work for yourself:
Camera: Kodak EasyShare Z1485 IS.
In addition to correcting the perspective and angles, Hugin has matched the lighting almost perfectly.
Here is a snow panorama from Father Pitt’s favorite little stream valley in Mount Lebanon:
Camera: Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z3.
This picture is put together from three separate photographs—again, with the camera hand-held, and with little serious attempt to be careful about lining things up. The lighting is not matched perfectly, but it’s not a bad job at all.
Here is a broad panorama made from four pictures:
Camera: Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z3.
Now here is something more interesting, from a technical point of view, though from an artistic point of view it’s just another boring old snow-in-the-woods picture:
Camera: Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z3.
It looks like an ordinary rectangular photograph, but in fact it is made from four separate hand-held photographs—two above and two below. Hugin had to sort out the different angles and match the lighting, and it did a very good job, giving us a very-wide-angle photograph with an ordinary somewhat-wide-angle lens.
One curious thing about Hugin is that it cannot deal with pictures from the Samsung Digimax V4. By simple bad luck, this was the first camera old Pa Pitt tried with Hugin, and he was convinced for half an hour that the program was broken. No; it was just a strange incompatibility with that one camera. Father Pitt suspects there is something odd about the EXIF data generated by that camera. There is something odd about almost everything that camera does, so one is not surprised that it should be the only camera so far to give Hugin problems.
But unless you have a camera that confuses it (and those are probably very rare), Hugin is exactly what you need for combining individual photographs into one large picture. It earns Father Pitt’s endorsement—an endorsement he feels all the better about giving it because Hugin is free and open source.
-
Under Construction
For the first time since the boom of the 1980s, two skyscrapers are going up at once downtown. The Tower at PNC Plaza has topped out, and Tower Two-Sixty at The Gardens is rising on Forbes Avenue just up the street from the Diamond. We can see one of the cranes and a bit of the skeleton of the latter between two of the Fourth Avenue bank towers.
Camera: Kodak EasyShare Z1485 IS.
-
Smithfield Street Bridge at Sunset
Taken from the same vantage point as our previous pictures of the Smithfield Street Bridge, but a little later in the day.
Camera: Kodak EasyShare Z1485 IS.
-
Smithfield Street Bridge
