Father Pitt

Category: Photography

  • West Penn Building

    West Penn Building

    Charles Bickel designed this small skyscraper at First Avenue and Wood Street, which was finished in 1907. It’s a perfect demonstration of the base-shaft-cap form of an early skyscraper. In fact we can use this building as a textbook in our short course on how to read a Beaux-Arts skyscraper. The two-storey base contains the public aspects of the building—retail stores, public offices, and so on. The shaft is the main body of the building, a repeated pattern of windows and wall. The cap gives the building a presentable top, since a gentleman would not appear outdoors without his hat. Note also the floor just above the base outlined with a prominent border. That is the bosses’ floor, where the managers and other important people have their offices. “Form follows function,” as Louis Sullivan said; and in this case the form gives concrete shape to a social reality. You have now completed our course, and may award yourself a certificate.

    West Penn Building

  • Fun with a Jeweler’s Loupe

    Claytonia virginica

    A cell-phone camera has a very small lens. This can be a liability, but in some cases it can be an advantage. For example, the lens on a cheap phone is small enough to take pictures through a jeweler’s loupe. Above, flowers of Spring Beauty (Claytonia virginica), with the edge of the loupe left in the picture as a kind of visual statement of the theme of this article. Actually, it’s easy to put the lens right in the middle of the loupe and not see the edges at all. Here are some of the other things you can see with a loupe and a cheap little cell-phone camera:

    Lichen

    Lichen growing on a twig.

    Moss

    Moss on a log.

    Chickweed

    Chickweed (Stellaria media). For comparison, here is a fairly close photograph of the entire plant without the jeweler’s loupe:

    Stellaria media

  • A Medieval Fantasy

    A little experiment in digital art. It began with a photograph of one of the Gothic gateposts outside the chancery behind St. Paul’s Cathedral in Oakland. That was made black and white, and then put through a multiple-layer “etching” filter, and then every detail that looked at all modern was scribbled over. This is the result. Was it worth the work? Probably not, but one can always learn something from these experiments.

  • Fall in the City

    Sometimes old Pa Pitt decides to try some experiments with image editing. Here, for example, is a tree in color, with the rest of the picture in shades of grey. Was the result worth the effort? Well, possibly.

  • Announcement

    Technical problems kept old Pa Pitt out of this site, and he finally gave up and moved elsewhere, where the Internet ignored him. It seems that this is where the Web wants him to be. Having made the effort to overcome all obstacles, he is adding new content both here and at the other address, and gradually transferring two years’ worth of articles back here. (Update: The transfer has happened, and the other address no longer works.)

    Using These Pictures

    Father Pitt regrets that he may not be able to answer all the questions that accumulated while he was away. However, one that comes up frequently is “Can I use this picture?”—and the answer is always yes. All Father Pitt’s pictures are released under a Creative Commons CC0 public-domain dedication. You can use them for any purpose without asking permission.

  • Layers of History

    A change of tenants in this Victorian building on Liberty Avenue reveals an earlier layer of signs—one that makes old Pa Pitt wax nostalgic. For many years there was a Foto Hut here. Foto Hut was a chain of photography stores where amateur photographers could get all the basics for photography—including, of course, film and film developing. Digital photography is much cheaper, but Father Pitt still misses film.

  • “The Overturned Carriage” by David Gilmour Blythe

    David Gilmour Blythe, self-taught painter, produced some of the best satirical and humorous art in the nineteenth century. What made his humor and satire stand out was his eye for composition and shading: he may make you laugh, but it’s likely that the first thing you noticed was the striking play of light and shadow. He lived in Pittsburgh and environs all his life, and the Carnegie Museum of Art has a whole wall of his paintings in the nineteenth-century gallery; this is one of them. (The Duquesne Club also has a distinguished collection.) Father Pitt has known some horses like this one. How do you know when your horse has had enough? Don’t worry: the horse will let you know.

  • There’s No Such Thing as Correct Exposure

    Old Pa Pitt often tells young photographers that there’s no such thing as correct exposure. He likes to make dogmatic pronouncements like that and watch their reactions. But this is what he means. These two pictures of the skyline at night are taken at quite different exposures (two whole stops apart, in fact). The one above is the kind of exposure you will usually see in a night shot of a city skyline. The one below is much closer to the way the skyline actually appears to the eye of the observer. Which is correct? Neither, of course. It is a matter of taste, and of creating the image you, the photographer, wish to create.

  • Two-Color World

    Do you wish the world were more like an old postcard? Then you will want to visit Father Pitt’s new Two-Color World, a silly photographic experiment in which every picture is presented in old-fashioned two-color printing, like an old postcard or a two-strip Technicolor movie from 1929.

  • How Pittsburgh Neighborhoods Got Their Names

    East Liberty

    Over at Mental Floss, an interesting article tells us How 65 Pittsburgh Neighborhoods Got Their Names. Someone pointed out the article to old Pa Pitt, and he immediately noticed that three of the pictures were his. These are pictures he has donated to Wikimedia Commons, as he does most of his pictures these days, and he is delighted to see that people are finding them as useful as he had hoped.

    Carrick

    Garfield