One of the hinges on the great wooden doors of St. Paul’s Cathedral in Oakland.
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A Hinge
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The Westinghouse Memorial
Father Pitt thinks the Westinghouse Memorial in Schenley Park is the most effective memorial in Pittsburgh. Instead of a heroic statue of the great inventor George Westinghouse, what we see is a boy, representing the youth of the future, learning about Westinghouse’s accomplishments. Because of Westinghouse, we have safe high-speed travel and electricity in our homes, and many other astonishing things we take for granted today. Thousands of Westinghouse employees, who remembered the founder fondly, donated their own money to keep his memory alive. These pictures, which show only a small part of the memorial, were taken with a Kodak Tourist camera, a simple and very common folding camera that, like many other Kodak cameras of the time, has good optics and a reliable mechanism.
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Two More of St. Paul’s with a Toy Camera
The same drug-store digital camera, the same day, two more pictures. The view of the spire half-obscured by leaves suggests a poetic fantasy of a forgotten and immemorially ancient church. Or perhaps it suggests that a tree was in the way.
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St. Paul’s with a Toy Camera
It was one of those cheap digital cameras dangling from a hook in the drug store, but it takes pictures that, if you squint a bit, sort of remind you of the object the camera was pointed at. Here’s St. Paul’s Cathedral in Oakland as reflected in the glass of the Software Engineering Institute across the street:
And here are two more pictures of what would, liturgically speaking, be the west front of the cathedral, although geographically speaking it happens to be the south front:
One would prefer to use 120 film, or failing that 35-mm film, or failing that at least a better digital camera, but there are certain advantages to a camera nearly small enough to slip into a wallet. And the hazy glow from the cheap lens might be good for certain effects.
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The Cathedral of Learning, Cleaned
A view of the Cathedral of Learning from Presbyterian Hospital. All the old dirt has been cleaned off, and the grand old lady looks new again. It’s impressive from any angle, but especially so from the west, where the carefully orchestrated symphony of setbacks dominates but does not intimidate the whole university district.
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Medical Art Deco
The Medical Arts Building in Oakland is about as far into Art Deco as a respectable medical establishment would dare go. The entrance is particularly bold, with its broad expanse of glass revealing gorgeous chandeliers within, and a stone inscription (a bit blackened from decades of industrial soot) that belongs in a Pandro S. Berman production.
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Robert Burns Fans: Here’s Your Wallpaper
Andrew Carnegie and a number of other wealthy poetry-lovers gave us this statue of Robert Burns, which stands in Schenley Park on the grounds of Phipps Conservatory, just at the end of the Panther Hollow Bridge. So I’ve made it into a perfect computer wallpaper for Burns fans everywhere. The wallpaper comes in three different proportions; click on each image for the full-scale version.
The 1600 x 1200 version can be rescaled to fit 1280 x 960, 1024 x 768, 800 x 600, 640 x 480, or any other 4-to-3 display.
The 1680 x 1060 version can be scaled to fit widescreen displays.
The 1280 x 1024 version fits most last-generation CRT monitors at their highest resolution.
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A Kodak Pony and a Perfect Day
The Kodak Pony is a delightful camera. It’s cheap and rugged, but it takes very good pictures with its sharp Ektanar lens, and it leaves the photographer completely in control of the picture. It’s hard for today’s photographers to imagine how little automation you can get away with. Here’s what you do to take a picture with a Pony: Set the aperture (there’s no light meter, of course); set the shutter speed; set the focus (no rangefinder, so you have to estimate the distance); cock the shutter; push the shutter release; release the film lock; and wind for the next picture.
So part of the reason I love the Pony is because I get to do everything myself. For the remainder of my argument, i offer these two pictures, taken yesterday on the grounds of Phipps Conservatory, and both showing the Cathedral of Learning in the distance.
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Aspiration
A smokestack reaches for the sky from the Carnegie Institute heating plant. The picture is teeming with metaphorical possibilities, none of which will be elaborated here.
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Spring at Phipps
The Spring Flower Show at Phipps Conservatory had a whimsically classical theme: Praxiteles by way of Salvador Dali.
