Three River In The Night

Way above the Three Rivers of Pittsburg there's elegant dining behind a crystal wall... It's been there since the 1930s and 40s when Sinatra fronted the Dorsey Band up in the night-time sky with Steel City glimmering out to the horizon.

So okay so far... but.. Well. That's when Fred and Ginger were whirling through platinum and night dust... And Those evenings glimmered like diamonds on a princess's tiara. 

Hell, we can do color now with the ease of decorking champaign. So why remove it? And yet... sometimes a color-ectomy glides into a space where my emotions are so much differently receptive. Why izzat? Thoughts? Feelings? 

BTW... See that point down there? That's the hotel where Rita and I held our wedding reception 47 years ago tonight. Seems like yesterday. 

Steel City

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It rides upon
Three river ways
And like a
Boat at night
It rocks!

Pittsburg, PA
Canon 7D, Canon EF-S 10-22mm @12mm, PS4: Topaz, AlienSkin, SnapArt, Oil Paint, Custom brushes and textures

4 Rules Of Wedding Guest Etiquette Photography

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Maria and John were married last weekend in Pittsburgh. And the reception was held at LeMont...

The gourmet restaurant sits behind a crystal wall atop Mt. Washington which peers down upon The Point... where the mighty and historic Ohio, Monongahela, and Allegheny rivers swirl together to showcase Steel City's astonishing explosion of world headquarters.

While they're destined to enjoy a lot of things, the couple - my wife's cousins - will never again be the stars of a setting to rival their wedding afloat in a glimmering gem filled with everyone they love.

I wanted to capture one feeling to bring them back there each time they open it up over the years. A memory for them... So? How'd I do?

Following the rules...

When you're a guest there's a clear etiquette involving photography.

Most importantly, there's a professional who's earning a living documenting the event. .

• Rule number one... DON'T COMPETE! Don't interfere, insinuate, elbow, or shove into the pro-space. You're not the cook, so hunt for the crumbs.
• Rule Number two... Don't compose the bridal party. They have entered the zone of photography fatigue. The pro has done all of the standard poses, configurations, assemblies, and CLICHéS!!!!
• Rule Number three... Discover the details and candids. These are the atmospherics which will bring the memory book to life for the kids twenty years from now. You know the people better than the pro, know the culture. Know what will make Aunt Clara tear up, Uncle Jim giggle. You know about Harry's hairpiece and Myrna's implants.

And you know what the bride and groom consider romantic. If you want to give them a present, don't go looking to grab yourself one.

Here's your chance to repay your hosts for a great family meeting... By marrying your craft to their tastes.

• Rule 4... The wedding is NOT about you... yet strangely, the more invisible you become, the more memorable you will be....

Justin

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this is my nephew Justin. He's married to Suzy... who was last night's posting. We're in Pittsburgh for the Fourth Of July weekend. Fireworks are making my dog Rocco crazy. Poor little guy. He doesn't understand how patriotism involves exploding things. Hmmmm... maybe I don't either. Lemme think on that.

Loan Sale

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When can an image be
More than a noun?
When can an image
Become a verb?

Or maybe between
A noun and verb
An image becomes
Adverbial?

Or not, if it
Gets stuck as
A preposition or
A proposition.

Like a
Loan Sale.

Little Shot - Pittsburgh at Seventh

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In most towns you're a big shot towering over the little guys. In most towns when your sinewy, durable, and flashy - they get out of your way. In most towns you stand above the crowd, even look down upon most.

But not in the BIG TOWN. Not in the cities with major league teams, symphonies, and ballets. Not in the cities which drove America to greatness. Not where metals met finance all tempered in white hot Bessemer cauldrons. You've left most towns Baby... here in the port city you're cute, perhaps charming. Yeah, you get noticed, even hold your ground. But here you share even the smallest spotlights. In BIG TOWN you're not even part of the skyline.

Yeah, in most towns at your size you'd be a big shot, here in the canyons, your shot's a lot more little.

City Sidewalks

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Like the fiber in a tapestry the artist and the city are wound tight. In Pittsburgh each glimmers inextricably.

It's odd that cities and artists need one another when the functions they perform seem so different. Which I suppose explain why artists revile so much of urban life, longing for an imagined peace in the "natural" ways of the countryside. And why cities dismiss the artists' bitching, whining, and longing for a better place as so much pretentious prattle.

I like urban tensions, I think they attract my lens the way trailer parks attract cyclones.

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GEEK STUFF: Downtown Pittsburgh, PA. Canon EOS 20D, 12/26/07:2:45 pm: Lens 10-22mm, Focal Length: 10mm, Exp 1/125@f/7.1, ISO 400, Metering Mode: pattern, Exposure bias 0, Camera RAW

What.. what was that name?

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Pittsburgh on a cloudy day annoys my memory. I am old enough to remember grade school textbooks which carried few if any colored pictures. And many of the illustrations were bought from a famous clip service. Whether they were art or history books - there were a lot of monochrome images that looked like engravings. And they all came from the same place. And here's where the memory thing cuts in. I can recall the pictures. And I can recall that they all had a credit line. And that even when they were colored the hues looked cheerlessly weird. As if the printer could only mix about seven or eight colors total... and almost all of them were gloomy primary hues. Which of course made their subjects seem somehow –grim.

Does this resonate with anyone? What I'm after was the name on the credit line. The company that supplied the images was a gallery, or a studio... darn. I don’t even know how to set up a Google search.

But anyway... no matter what I did with this picture of Pittsburgh on a dreary day - it made itself look like this. Like an artificially colored engraving in a child's ancient textbook. I think perhaps this says a lot more about me, than about Steel City, eh?


HEY! THANKS!!!

A flurry of email revealed that I was thinking of the Bettman Archives. Begun in the 1930's by John Bettman the huge collection.. sometimes called "The Clip Mine" was bought by Bill Gates some years back. And whatever they pictured in my grade-school-years looked a lot like this example over on Corbis....

Judgmental? Uh-Huh.

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Why not judge? So much of Pittsburgh is grim. Look at this street. The homes are maintained in the sense that they are generally clean, the siding is rugged, and the sidewalks are swept. The owners can afford reasonably new cars and satellite dishes. So why are they aggressively insensitive to the dingy, depressing discordancy of the way their residences look like so much architectural litter? Don't they get the Home & Garden channel on those ugly dishes? Here're private property rights gone carcinogenic. There's no way to make an uplifting image of this urban flotsam. I know... I know... I am being judgmental. But maybe judgments are what's needed to keep civilization from fraying around the edges. Like here in Pittsburgh.

Tractor Beam

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Pittsburgh has two Apple Stores! There is only one in the entire eastern part of Pennsylvania. Hmmmm.... And since we were visiting Pittsburgh, well, HEY! Unless they tie me to the mast and pour wax in my ears, I am going to throw myself up against the place. This one is in Shadyside, a chi-chi spot where medical people vie with Univeristy of Pittsburgh students to buy latté, Lord & Taylor, and posh art. I'm guessing the shells around the shops are remains of mid-nineteenth century brick and shutter buildings. Lancaster could look like Shadyside... and any twelve women off the street could look like Gwyneth Paltrow with a zillion bucks worth of fashion, cosmetic and surgical enhancement. Hell, it takes Gwyneth Paltrow a zillion bucks worth of cosmetic, fashion, and surgical enhancement to look like Gwyneth Paltrow.
But anyway... here's an image of the money-magnet store looking all sexy and alluring. Yeah, I went in. Yeah, I came out with a portable HD and a new graphic application. It was like shooting up... right into a vein. It rocks! Thank God there's no Apple Store in Lancaster.

Rotogravure

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Visited an antique dealer recently. She had a collection of newspapers from the 1950s. The society section was in a strange sort of color that was called Rotogravure, I think. Don't know much about the process, but the colors were peculiar. So when I stood atop Mount Troy overlooking Pittsburgh today, I had those slightly fading, slightly out of register, slightly off colors in mind. They seemed right to capture this aging city's vision of itself. Can you feel the mood?