Father Pitt

Tag: Panoramas

  • Pittsburgh in 1963

    1963 panorama of downtown Pittsburgh
    Roger Wollstadt from Sarasota, Florida, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

    The skyline of Pittsburgh in 1963 was very different from the skyline today. The U. S. Steel Building had not yet risen to dwarf everything else, and the other skyscrapers that today seem to be the signature forms of the skyline would go up in the 1980s. At the extreme right, we can see the Civic Auditorium, only two years old; it would later be known as the Civic Arena, and then as the Mellon Arena.

    This panorama was built from two pictures taken by Roger Wollstadt, to whom all our gratitude is due. Old Pa Pitt saw them in Wikimedia Commons and noticed that Mr. Wollstadt had taken them from the same spot, merely rotating the camera a bit to take in a different part of the cityscape. That meant they would probably combine with no visible errors, and indeed they did.

    Note the Creative Commons license for the picture, which is not the public-domain dedication Father Pitt uses for his own pictures. You can do anything you like with this picture, but you must attribute Roger Wollstadt as the original author, and you must make any new versions available under the same license.

  • Firstside

    Firstside from Mount Washington

    A large composite picture (it’s 8,911 × 2,319 pixels if you enlarge it) of the row of buildings along Fort Pitt Boulevard in the Firstside Historic District. Before the boulevards isolated the city from the shore, these buildings used to face the Monongahela Wharf, a chaotically busy inland port where steamboats by the dozens loaded and unloaded their passengers and cargo.

  • Downtown

    Part of the skyline
    Sony Alpha 3000.

    Some large panoramas of the Pittsburgh skyline as seen from Mount Washington.

    Pittsburgh skyline
    Skyline of Pittsburgh from Mount Washington
    Pittsburgh skyline panorama

  • The Skyline in 1999

    Skyline in 1999

    Two negatives stitched together; they had quite different lighting, but with some yanking and prodding in the GIMP, old Pa Pitt was able to make the seam nearly invisible. At the far left, we can see a big plot of cleared ground where PNC Park is about to be built.

  • The Skyline on a Grey December Day

  • The Skyline at Sunset

    Above, a fairly large panorama made from five individual pictures. Below, a “high-dynamic-range” picture made from three separate exposures.

  • 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.

  • Oakland Skyline in Panorama

    The South Side Slopes give us excellent views of the Oakland skyline. We’ve already seen the point of view from St. Michael’s Cemetery; now here is the view from Mission Street a little to the east and halfway down the hill. Click on the picture to see a good bit of detail.

  • Oakland Panoramas

    Two panoramas of the Oakland medical-intellectual district. Above, from Panther Hollow Bridge; below, from Schenley Park near the Oval. They are very large if you click on them.