I don’t know if I ever would have visited Pittsburgh if it wasn’t part of the USA tour, and that’s a shame because it’s a really cool city. The city is great to shoot and the bridges always make for a good subject matter. It’s also a great walking city where you can just criss-cross the river as many times as you need to find some interesting shots.
Right before I took this photo, I went over to Paddy’s Pub, which you may know from the show It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I don’t know if that pub started AFTER the show got popular or before. It didn’t look exactly the same, but it was still pretty cool and I’d recommend it!
This is a great video from The Economist. If you look more into it, you don’t even need to have severe PTSD to benefit from these molecules.
I don’t really like watching baseball on TV, but I do enjoy going to the games. I can imagine how especially awesome it was in the olden days before TV and technology and everything. People must have been basically totally bored and starved for entertainment, so going to a baseball game must have been a big deal.
I’ve always thought that the word “funicular” was a strange one. I looked it up to see the origin, hoping to find something really interesting, but it’s not. It comes from the Latin word for rope. Anyway, I guess none of that matters, because if you use the funicular in Pittsburg, you get this incredible view. There’s not a great viewing area up there because most of the hill is used up by private homes and restaurants. We sort of sneaked into an apartment lobby and went out to the balcony to get this particular view.
When people ask me which city I was most surprised by during my trip to the US, I always say Pittsburg! I had no idea how beautiful it was. Anyway, it gave me another chance to experiment with a new technique, which you can see in today’s photo. Now, when I take cityscape shots, I purposefully cut off the top of the buildings so you can’t quite tell what city it is. From sharing travel photos from so many places around the world, I notice people really enjoy trying to guess where a place is. Showing the whole skyline, therefore, makes the photo a bit more predictable and boring!
What a great city Philly is! On my first night here, I was staying over there on the left at the Ritz-Carlton, and then I went out to take some night time photos. Usually, when I arrive in a new city, I have an unexplained high level of energy. I love to use this energy to go out and get lost in the city and take photos. The whole city felt very safe to me, so I had no problem roaming around and finding scenes like this. That’s the giant City Hall right there in the middle. It’s a well laid out city because there are four long roads that all lead right to that iconic building.
Here’s a fun photo captured by Curtis while we were in Pittsburgh together. I don’t normally climb stuff, but in this case, I climbed up one of those bright yellow bridges there! We spent the day with our Brazilian photographer friends Rodrigo and Ricardo Polesso… navigating our way all through the city throughout the day and the night.
I must have walked back and forth across these bridges like 30 times! They were so photogenic and really popped as the night colors came online. The bridges had a great pedestrian walking area too. The city is smartly laid out with parks all over the place so it gives you a reason to wander around from bridge to bridge and park to park. I’ve been in many cities where the downtown area is very poorly planned and they are not walkable at all. A few cities that pop into mind are places like Dallas, Orlando, and Reno. They’re fine cities… don’t get me wrong… just not really a “joy” to walk around like Pittsburgh.
Who know Pittsburgh was this beautiful!?! I certainly had no idea! I didn’t know it was so colorful… that was maybe the most surprising thing to me. There’s a little hillock/mountain that you can ascend via a funicular. We took it up around sunset so we could take a variety of photos as the sun was setting. This tends to be my favorite time to shoot: just after sunset so there is a mix of artificial and natural, ambient light.
Now, when you click through to the image on SmugMug, there is a new “button” on the lower left that lets you see the EXIF. It will scroll in from the side and you can see all the nitty-gritty details. I had to do it on this one because I could not remember if I took it in Pittsburgh or Philly!
Philly had some great neon signs! I would pass this one almost every night on the way back to the Ritz-Carlton. By the way, thanks again to everyone that came out to the art talk there. That was a really special and fun night. It was great to see my friend Joseph Mina (@hawaiianstarman on Insta) again too! 🙂
