Father Pitt

Tag: Monochrome

  • St. Boniface in Black and White

    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.

    Map

  • Snow Is Falling

  • Fort Pitt Blockhouse, 2001

    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.

  • Impressionistic View from Penn Station

    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.

  • The View from Mount Washington, in Black and White

    It was a perfect day for skyline pictures, with puffy white clouds filling the sky. This is how it looked in black and white.

  • United Steelworkers Building

    The United Steelworkers Building in a picture from last December. The architects were Curtis and Davis, who did nothing else that old Pa Pitt knows of in Pittsburgh.

  • Textures in the Rocks

    A small cave and layers of sedimentary rocks in the Saw Mill Run valley, Seldom Seen.

  • Sun and Shade

    Patterns of sun and shade on the rocks in the middle of Saw Mill Run, Seldom Seen, with a railroad bridge in the background.

  • The Morgue

    The Allegheny County Morgue (or Mortuary, when the coroner was feeling fancy) was designed by Frederick Osterling to match Richardson’s courthouse. It was originally built where the County Office Building stands now, and it was moved to make way for that building, inch by inch, while the coroner and staff continued to work inside the crawling building.

  • Waterfall on First Avenue

    This waterfall fountain runs down the gentle slope along First Avenue in front of the PNC Firstside Center.