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Sunset on Carson Street
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Duquesne Brewery Clock Illuminated
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There’s No Such Thing as Correct Exposure
Old Pa Pitt often tells young photographers that there’s no such thing as correct exposure. He likes to make dogmatic pronouncements like that and watch their reactions. But this is what he means. These two pictures of the skyline at night are taken at quite different exposures (two whole stops apart, in fact). The one above is the kind of exposure you will usually see in a night shot of a city skyline. The one below is much closer to the way the skyline actually appears to the eye of the observer. Which is correct? Neither, of course. It is a matter of taste, and of creating the image you, the photographer, wish to create.
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Evening Skyline
There are thousands of pictures of the skyline of Pittsburgh by night; this is not the best, but it is probably the most up-to-date on the Web at the moment. The skyline is changing, after all, so all those other pictures are completely passé.
Camera: Konica-Minolta DiMAGE Z3.
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Light-Up Night
It would be hard to explain Light-Up Night to an out-of-towner. The abstract idea of a night when Christmas lights are turned on for the season is not hard to convey, but no words could describe the seething mass of cheerful humanity that gathers downtown, stuffing trolleys like rolling sardine cans and tying up traffic for hours. It is a night when every good Pittsburgher feels obliged to pay his respects to the Golden Triangle. There are bands, orchestras, choirs, street performers, multiple fireworks displays, lights, ice skating, and even a few random acts of kindness. Every year it’s a bigger deal than last year.
The Horne’s Christmas tree, above, is a tradition that predates Light-Up Night by decades. The Horne’s department store is gone, but the owners of the building still graciously allow us to admire the famous tree that takes up a whole corner of what used to be our second-largest department store.
