The lobby of One PPG Place. Father Pitt has decided to round up a random number (twenty-nine, as it turns out) of pictures from 2024 that he thought had exceeded his usual standard, and here they are to goad him into doing better next year.

Lantern in Allegheny West.

St. Bernard’s Church, Mount Lebanon.

House in Virginia Manor, Mount Lebanon.

Liberty Avenue from Seventh Avenue.

The Sixth Street or Roberto Clemente bridge.

Fern fiddlehead.

Fourth Avenue bank towers.

Dandelion seeds.

House in Seminole Hills, Mount Lebanon.

Evening sun on the Donahoe’s building.

A panorama of the skyline from Mount Washington.

Entrance to the Union Trust Building.

The Logan-Gregg Hardware Company building, designed by Charles Bickel. This composite of six photographs produced a very good architectural elevation of the façade.

Alcoa Corporate Center.

Liberty Center.

Tree and moon.

A gravedigger at work behind the grave of Andy Warhol.

Hilltop neighborhood with misty skyline.

Flax (Linum usitatissimum).

Union Church in Robinson Township.

Abstract forms in the Gateway subway station.

Fall colors at Gateway Center.

This picture of tombstones in Clinton Cemetery was taken with an Argus A, which is going on 90 years old, on Kentmere Pan 100 film, and developed in a monobath. It was meant to be a picture for Halloween, and it succeeded in creating exactly the right mood.

Armstrong monument in the South Side Cemetery.

A Novembery picture of a stairway on Acorn Hill.

The back slopes of Mount Washington, seen with a long lens from Beltzhoover.

The roofline of the Haller Baking Company building in Emsworth.

A picture of some houses on Baywood Street in East Liberty. It looks like nothing special, but that is the point of it. It illustrates the streetscape very well, and in composition and color it is one of Father Pitt’s favorite pictures to look at.

Yesterday we published this picture of Robin Hill—

—with a bit of a story about how the picture was made. It was stitched together from three separate photographs, but trying to do it automatically flummoxed the stitching software and, as Father Pitt said at the time, “produced a comical monstrosity reminiscent of Frank Gehry.”

In a comment, Von Hindenburg writes,

I think that I speak for many of your readers when I say that I’d like to see the Gehryesque nightmare as an example of the process that you go through to share these images.

How many of those readers do share that desire will never really be known, but old Pa Pitt is always happy to oblige even one of them.

These were the three original photographs:

This is what the Hugin software—which is normally very good at its job—did with them:

Father Pitt then tried the experiment of putting together only the left and center photographs, which worked perfectly. But trying to add that combined picture to the third one made a different but equally comical mess. The only thing to do was to put in the control points—points of identity between the pictures—by hand. Normally Father Pitt would just give up before doing that, but he was feeling stubborn, and he thought he might get a picture he liked.

Now you know a little about how old Pa Pitt normally does otherwise impossibly wide-angled pictures of buildings. Usually it is a matter of pressing a couple of buttons and letting the machine do the work, then tweaking the results. Once in a while, though, it involves what almost feels like honest labor, which is against our usual principles, but may be indulged in on rare occasions.

Coffey Way in downtown Pittsburgh. This is not only the best picture of the year, but possibly the best one old Pa Pitt has ever published. He took a number of photographs from more or less this same angle, but when the barely visible figures in dark clothing wandered into the frame, he knew this would be the one.

If old Pa Pitt were at all concerned about his reputation as an artist, he would publish about one picture a week, if that many. Art is not his primary purpose here, however. His aim is to document the treasures that surround us, and he is willing to accept second-rate pictures if they show the object reasonably well. Sometimes, however, he does try to aim a little higher than that. These are some of his favorite pictures from the past year, not because of what they depict, but purely as photographic compositions.

The Childes-Callery-Casey-Falk House, now the Chancellor’s Residence for the University of Pittsburgh. It was designed by Peabody & Stearns and built in 1897. This was a perfect late-fall day, and in spite of the temptation to turn up the saturation to bring out the colors of the leaves, the picture seemed to work best when it was a little less colorful and just slightly melancholy.

St. Peter’s Church on the North Side. For this picture, Father Pitt actually hauled a tripod down to the North Side. He does not usually put that much effort into anything, so this one gets on the list just because it was extra work.

Dandelion seeds.

The onion domes on Holy Virgin Russian Orthodox Church in Carnegie, lightly dusted with snow. It took a fair amount of fiddling to get the domes and the crosses and the subtle clouds behind them all at the right shades.

The entrance to the Kinder Building in Allegheny West. At night the Beaux-Arts architecture takes on just the right air of mystery; we expect to see Humphrey Bogart emerge and be accosted by a shadowy figure in a trench coat.

Fall in the Union Dale Cemetery.

Bridges on the Monongahela. Taken from the south shore, this picture seems to tell the story of an urbanized river.

Myosotis laxa, the Lesser Forget-Me-Not.

Urn with resting fawn, Allegheny Cemetery.

The Peoples Building, McKeesport. Sometimes Father Pitt must admit that the weather has more to do with making a good picture than the skill of the photographer. In this case, he can take some credit for using a red filter to bring out the contrast between sky and clouds, but otherwise it was just a perfect day.

Penstemon digitalis, the Foxglove Beardtongue. This is a good picture of a flower taken under unfavorable conditions: bright sunlight wipes out details and makes it hard to get good botanical pictures. One solution is the one adopted in this picture, which is to have the sun shining through rather than on the flowers.

The entrance to St. Francis Xavier Church in Brighton Heights, designed by William P. Hutchins. This picture is made from a stack of three photographs at different exposures.

The Trimont (designed by Lou Astorino), seen in silhouette. It is not old Pa Pitt’s favorite building in the city, but certain views have dramatic photographic possibilities.

A very patriotic streetcar picture from Beechview.

Winter branches against sunset clouds.

What’s at the end of the rainbow? A streetcar, of course.

Throughout the year 2022, old Pa Pitt managed to put up at least one new article every day. To celebrate the changing of the years, here are twelve of his favorite pictures from last year, one for each month:

January

A vase of witch hazel.

February

Church of the Ascension, Shadyside.

March

Crocuses in the rain.

April

Fox squirrel.

May

Interior of Heinz Chapel.

June

Mammatus clouds at sunset.

July

Spotted Lanternfly nymph.

August

Retreating storm clouds behind the spire of Third Presbyterian Church, Shadyside.

September

Atlas on the Kaufmann’s Clock.

October

Chimney pots on the South Side.

November

The skyline of downtown with November leaves.

December

The colossal columns of the Mellon Institute illuminated from within at twilight.

Since these two sites see nearly as many visits as Father Pitt’s main site here, they deserve their own domain names. They have therefore moved to a snappy new server and been given a complete redesign—with, of course, a black-and-gold site logo for each to make sure you know where you are. The old addresses will continue to work indefinitely, but new content will appear at these new domains:

https://pittsburghcemeteries.com/

https://florapittsburghensis.com/

The new server will allow us to offer some features not available before—notably an alphabetical index for each site.