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Rooftops of Polish Hill
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Strawberry Way
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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.
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First Avenue Station
The distinctive undulating platform roofs of the First Avenue subway station, seen from across First Avenue.
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Tracks in the Snow
A rookie hunter might follow these tracks expecting to find a freight train; but a seasoned tracker would notice that they are Pennsylvania broad gauge, and therefore must lead to a trolley eventually.
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Witch Hazel
Ozark witch hazel (Hamamelis vernalis) is one of old Pa Pitt’s favorite plantings. It blooms in the dead of winter; it keeps its petals closed until a warmer day comes along, and then it unfurls its little red flowers and floods its surroundings with perfume. But if you bring in a few twigs and put them in a vase, you don’t have to wait for a warm day. The flowers will unfurl within hours, and then in a day or two the perfume will start filling your house. You can have a fresh bouquet from the garden in the middle of January.
The twiggy bouquets make an interesting display, and for some reason it occurred to Father Pitt that he should attempt to photograph one in the manner of the 1930s.
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Snow on a Fence
A wooden fence with snow accumulating on it, rendered as a nineteenth-century engraving. Several steps went into this rendition—compensating for lens distortion, adjusting perspective, converting the picture to black-and-white, enhancing details two different ways, and finally the Colored Engraving filter by Lyle Kroll and David Tschumperlé, which is one of (at last count) 574 different filters and effects available in the G’MIC image-processing framework.
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Skyline Abstraction
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Software Engineering Institute
The twentieth century did not pass old Pa Pitt by entirely: sometimes he indulges in a bit of abstract expressionism. This is the Dithridge Street wall of the Software Engineering Institute in Oakland, as seen obliquely with a long lens.
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Composition with Utility Cables
An alley on the South Side, taken in 2008 with a Kodak Retinette.
