This is actually a color photograph of a branch against a grey, rainy sky; but when old Pa Pitt tried the experiment of converting it to black and white, nothing changed at all. This is therefore a color photograph of a completely monochromatic scene.
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.
These pictures were taken in 2001 with an old folding Agfa camera. Of course the blockhouse, which is more than two and a half centuries old, doesn’t change much these days.
A twenty-year-old view taken with an eighty-year-old camera, looking out from under the Rotunda at Penn Station. Old Pa Pitt has been wandering in his archives, and we shall see a few more pictures from twenty years or so ago over the next few weeks.
It was a perfect day for skyline pictures, with puffy white clouds filling the sky. This is how it looked in black and white.
A small cave and layers of sedimentary rocks in the Saw Mill Run valley, Seldom Seen.
Patterns of sun and shade on the rocks in the middle of Saw Mill Run, Seldom Seen, with a railroad bridge in the background.
