This is the tower of St. Basil’s in Carrick. Old Pa Pitt didn’t notice the bird when he was taking pictures, or he might have tried to go after it with a long lens. If you enlarge this picture to full size, you will see a peregrine falcon sitting on the cross, probably waiting for an unwary pigeon.
Luminarias surround the obelisk on PPG Plaza. We had to forgo Light Up Night this year, but it will be back when large crowds closely packed seem like less of a threat.
Currently part of Holy Apostles parish, St. Basil’s occupies a splendid hilltop site from which its great rose window can be seen for miles. St. Basil himself presides over the façade, imprisoned in a cage that keeps the pigeons out and St. Basil in.
More of St. Boniface on East Street. These pictures were taken with a Samsung Digimax V4, which was quite a camera in its day. Though it fits (lumpily) in a pocket, it has a Schneider-Kreuznach Varioplan lens and allows manual control of everything. It is also the slowest camera old Pa Pitt has ever used, and he includes folding roll-film cameras in that calculation. It is especially slow if you set it to save in uncompressed TIFF format; then the time between shots is about 45 seconds, during which one could probably expose a whole roll of 620 film in a 6×9 roll-film camera.
But Father Pitt has decided to make this limitation part of the artistic experience: he knows he will be taking one shot, and thus has a strong motivation to compose it carefully. He has also set the camera to black-and-white only, making it his dedicated monochrome camera. In effect he has turned it into a Leica Monochrom, but one with a 4-megapixel sensor instead of a 40-megapixel sensor. It is in fact nowhere near a Leica Monochrom, but it does take pretty good pictures. And Father Pitt paid about $8 for it instead of $8,000, so he believes his money was well spent.
Emerald View Park is a catch-all name for a string of parks ringing Mount Washington. In the section off Greenleaf Street are many remnants of at least one old house and some other constructions. Since old plat maps show nothing precisely here, this may have been dumped debris from a demolition nearby. Now the forest is taking over, but sections of brick wall and tile floor make surreal additions to the woodland scene.
A view from the outbound platform of the Station Square subway station in 2001. Except for the signage, not much has changed.
The seeds of Autumn Clematis (Clematis terniflora) look like little comets close up, or perhaps like tropical fish in a feeding frenzy.
Above: the West End Bridge over the Ohio, with the Ohio Connecting Railroad Bridge behind it, and the McKees Rocks Bridge behind that. Below, the Allegheny, with the Fort Duquesne Bridge, the Three Sisters, the Fort Wayne railroad bridge, the Veterans Bridge, and the Sixteenth Street Bridge. For extra credit, see if you can point out the Twenty-Eighth Street Bridge. (Click on the picture to make it very big.)
Three different carved capitals at the entrance to St. Boniface Church on East Street.
