The White Whale bookstore in Bloomfield. This is Father Pitt’s attempt at applying the principles of De Stijl to photography.
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Bookstore After Dark
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The President Apartments, Shadyside
This phone-camera picture is soupy with noise reduction if you enlarge it, but it gives us a good idea of how the Flash Gordon glass-block window in the stairwell looks at night.
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Tree and Moon
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Bridges at Night
The Three Sisters bridges have a new lighting scheme. Above, the Roberto Clemente or Sixth Street Bridge; below, the Andy Warhol or Seventh Street Bridge.
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Western Theological Seminary, Allegheny West
“Blue hour” pictures are very fashionable these days. Well, old Pa Pitt can do those too, if you really want them.
We also have pictures of the Western Theological Seminary by day.
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Calvary Methodist Church at Night
Calvary Methodist Church in Allegheny West is floodlit at night, and old Pa Pitt stopped the other night to get a few pictures. The design of this church is credited to Vrydaugh & Shepherd with T. B. Wolfe. Vrydaugh & Wolfe would soon become a partnership designing a number of fine churches and millionaires’ mansions. Old Pa Pitt does not know what happened to Shepherd.
These pictures were all taken hand-held with very slow shutter speeds. Photographers will tell you that you cannot take a sharp hand-held picture at 1/10 of a second. What they mean is that you cannot reliably take a sharp picture. With digital photography, where individual pictures cost nothing, what you can do is take a dozen or two pictures and hope that one of them will be sharp.
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Winter Light Garden at Phipps Conservatory
This year’s Winter Flower Show and Light Garden ends tomorrow to make way for the annual Orchid and Bonsai Show. The conservatory is open late for the light show, which has become one of Pittsburgh’s chief holiday attractions.
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Christmas Tree in the Skating Rink at PPG Place
With computers, it is possible to make the lights on a Christmas tree an ever-changing animated kaleidoscope of movement and color. According to the laws of American taste, if it is possible, it is mandatory.
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Entrance to the Kinder Building, Allegheny West
The Kinder Building is a little Beaux-Arts masterpiece at the corner of Western Avenue and Galveston Avenue. At night its carefully balanced classical entrance takes on a pleasing air of mystery.
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St. Peter’s Church, North Side
Built in 1872 from a design by Andrew Peebles, this cathedral-sized church did become a cathedral about three years later for the short-lived Catholic Diocese of Allegheny, which was formed by taking the rich half away from the diocese of Pittsburgh and leaving all the debt with the poor half. The diocese was suppressed in 1889, but old dioceses never die, and there is still a titular Bishop of Allegheny. The current holder of the title is a retired auxiliary bishop of Newark.
This relief of the Resurrection takes on added drama at night.
We also have pictures of St. Peter’s by daylight.
