
The skyline on a perfect day, rendered in old-postcard colors.


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.


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.

Mount Washington is the favorite skyline viewing post, but the views from across the Allegheny are impressive in their own way. These pictures were taken just as the sun was setting.
Camera: Canon PowerShot S45. The panorama below is a composite of five photographs.


A grey day, and the U. S. Steel Tower has its head in the clouds, as it often has. Below we see the frozen back channel of the Allegheny at Herr’s Island (or Washington’s Landing).
