Mysteries abound in a city when it’s had two and a half centuries to accumulate them. This old foundation in West End Park has obviously been here for a while. How old is it? The land for the park was bought in 1875; was this a little farmhouse from before that time? Father Pitt would be happy to hear from anyone who knows more about the history of this structure.
This little out-of-the-way park on a steep knob overlooking the West End Valley has one of Pittsburgh’s least-known memorials by one of Pittsburgh’s best-known sculptors. Frank Vittor, creator of some of our most prominent public art, designed this memorial for the soldiers who fought in the First World War.
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.
Here we have a short film, whose source is unidentified, of some of the cleanup after the St. Patrick’s Day Flood in 1936. It seems to be amateur footage, but it’s good enough to show us what a mess everything was. (It seems to be impossible to embed correctly on wordpress.com, so you’ll actually have to leave this site to see it. But hurry on back.)
Jellyfish at the PPG Aquarium in Pittsburgh from Father Pitt on Vimeo.
This wonderfully graceful jellyfish does its slow ballet all day long at the PPG Aquarium, on the grounds of the Pittsburgh Zoo in Highland Park. Note that there is no sound with this video, since the jellyfish really had very little to say.
Peacocks roam freely at the Pittsburgh Zoo. This one gave a performance of the famous peacock mating dance to dozens of spectators outside one of the snack shops. Unfortunately, the peahen who was the object of his affections was more interested in spilled popcorn, and the poor fellow finally had to give up and fold his tail.
…and that, of course, means new flowers appearing over at Flora Pittsburghensis, such as this tiny but cheerful Hairy Bittercress (Cardamine hirsuta).
Max Raabe and the Palast Orchester will be playing at the Byham on April 15. Here’s a sample of their work on a song from the 1930s musical Evergreen.
Hail the size of commercial ice cubes came down on parts of Pittsburgh this afternoon. (Hail of this size is most commonly compared to golf balls, but old Pa Pitt is not a golfer.) More than an hour and a half after it fell, this hailstone and many others were still sitting on the grass mocking the 50-degree weather.
Hamamelis vernalis is a species of witch hazel whose native range is restricted to the Ozark Plateau. It will grow quite happily in Pittsburgh, however, and is well worth seeking out. The first warm winter day, from about Christmas on, will bring out these intriguing little flowers all over the bush. They’re not all that much to look at, although they make a beautiful ikebana-style bouquet in a vase. But the scent is sweet and very strong; a few twigs can scent a whole house. When the weather turns cold again, the flowers fold up, ready to show themselves once more on the next warm day. Meanwhile, if you cut a twig and bring it in at any time during the winter, it will unfurl its little flowers and get to work pumping out perfume.
