The skyline of Oakland, seen from the Bob O’Connor Golf Course in Schenley Park.
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Oakland Panorama
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Low-Tech Film Scanner
If you look through Father Pitt’s archives, you may see that Father Pitt used to do many of his pictures on film with a motley collection of ancient cameras. Lately those cameras have not seen much use, largely because Father Pitt’s old transparency scanner died, and it’s expensive to get a scanner that handles medium-format film.
A while ago old Pa Pitt heard of a photographer who used a light table and a digital camera to digitize large-format negatives. Would the same technique work for medium-format negatives? It might, but would one want to invest in a decent light table without knowing that it would? It would be better to have some proof of concept, as an engineer might say. If only it were possible to create an inexpensive light table, good enough to try out the idea and see whether it might work…
Father Pitt stared for an hour at the screen on his laptop computer, looking through various Web sites for ideas for a home-made light table. They all seemed to require materials that would cost almost as much as a commercial light table.
And then, after many sites, a light bulb suddenly lit up over Pa Pitt’s head. He was staring at a laptop screen. A laptop screen is a backlit flat surface. If we open up a blank text document and maximize it to fill the screen, we have a light table. Father Pitt was tempted to slap his forehead, but feared the effects on his periwig.
Here’s a picture of the Westinghouse Memorial in Schenley Park, taken on 120 film and digitized with the laptop light table and a digital camera. Obviously the laptop light table is not a permanent solution: you can see the pixel grid too clearly. But for a quick look at what’s on the negative, it works surprisingly well. More importantly, it shows that a proper light table would probably be just as good as a mid-priced film scanner, and much cheaper.
So Father Pitt’s 620 Special and his Speedex and all his other favorite cameras can come out of their forced retirement. It turns out that there’s an astonishingly cheap and simple way to digitize medium-format film.
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Oakland in the Snow
Click on the picture to enlarge it. The Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh is a substantial city in its own right. The heart of it is the third-largest central business district in Pennsylvania, whose skyline we see here across the open white spaces of the Schenley Park golf course.
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A Stroll in Schenley Park
The Bob O’Connor Golf Course at Schenley Park, like the rest of the city, was quickly covered with eight inches of snow overnight. The next day, the snow was still fresh and untouched, except where the occasional adventurous walker had made a path through it.
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Cathedral of Learning in the Snow
It’s been snowing just a little every day, just enough to keep the snow beautiful all over the city.
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Phipps by Night
A massive glass sculpture by Dale Chihuly hangs in the dome of the entrance to Phipps Conservatory. The conservatory is open until 10:00 Friday nights.
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Schenley Fountain
The Mary Schenley Memorial Fountain in Oakland, with the Cathedral of Learning in the background. Both have recently been restored. Somewhere underneath that fountain lies a buried bridge, left there when a hollow was filled in to make Schenley Plaza.
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Forgotten Hero of the Spanish-American War
Everything old Pa Pitt remembers about Col. Alexander Leroy Hawkins is inscribed on the Spanish-American War Monument in Schenley Park. No one seems to think of him today, but he was obviously all the rage in 1899, when he died at sea. He was a hero of the Spanish-American War; he died during the the subsequent Philippine Insurrection, when the ungrateful natives, entirely disregarding the proven fact that the United States was a much nicer colonial power than Spain, attempted to set up their own republican government on their own terms, forcing the Americans to crush all resistance in order to guarantee them a republican form of government.
Mark Twain was one of the most vocal opponents of “American imperialism,” and he used the now-familiar term “quagmire” to describe our involvement in the Philippines:
I have tried hard, and yet I cannot for the life of me comprehend how we got into that mess. Perhaps we could not have avoided it—perhaps it was inevitable that we should come to be fighting the natives of those islands—but I cannot understand it, and have never been able to get at the bottom of the origin of our antagonism to the natives. I thought we should act as their protector—not try to get them under our heel. We were to relieve them from Spanish tyranny to enable them to set up a government of their own, and we were to stand by and see that it got a fair trial. It was not to be a government according to our ideas, but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of the Filipinos, a government according to Filipino ideas. That would have been a worthy mission for the United States. But now—why, we have got into a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater.
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Robert Burns and Phipps Conservatory
Robert Burns stands guard in front of the Victoria Room at Phipps Conservatory. Schenley Park is full of unexpected statues around every corner.
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Phipps Hall of Botany
Tucked behind Phipps Conservatory, this grand little building houses an auditorium, some classrooms, and a huge portrait of Henry Phipps given by his friend Andrew Carnegie.
The delightful fountain in front is a recent installation, but looks like it belongs with the building.