Pittsburgh

Workshop Details

September 8-14, 2022 — Completed

This is a 6-night, 7-day workshop. Your adventure begins on the morning of Thursday, September 8, and ends after a final slideshow on the afternoon of Wednesday, September 14.

$2,495 + applicable taxes. Register below.

Skill level

Open to all who have an understanding of the basic principles of photography and of their cameras.

Group size

14, with 2 instructors — 7:1 ratio

Workshop Leaders

Registration

This event has passed. Thanks for your interest!

The Pittsburgh Experience

Welcome to the Steel City, The ‘Burgh, City of Bridges and the City of Champions. Pittsburgh has taken on many names since it was founded as a frontier village in 1758. Known back then as the “Gateway to the West,” Pittsburgh helped build so many of the great cities in our nation.

Gabe and Lance are very excited to share an urban night photography experience in one of the most underrated cities, Pittsburgh. Gabe has been photographing the Steel City for over 20 years, his wife is from there, and the ‘Burgh continues to inspire him on each visit.

We are thrilled to be working very closely with the Rivers of Steel, and to be the first workshop to photograph the remarkable Carrie Furnaces at night, and to be doing so for two nights! We’ll also visit this vestige of the steel industry during the day for their Festival of Combustion and experience iron casting, welding and more!

The hills of Pittsburgh and the many bridges that span the three rivers offer many vantage points for creative long exposures. We’ll take the Incline up to Mount Washington and also tour the three rivers by riverboat. We will have a couple of days for classroom teaching and image reviews, but most of this experience will be uncovering the oft-overlooked history of Pittsburgh during the day and night.

Highlights of some of the places we will visit include the Cathedral of Learning, Herr Island, Heinz History Center, Duquesne Incline, the Murals of Mexican War Streets, North Park, the Homestead Pump House and maybe even the Fountain of Youth!

This workshop will take place during the full moon, which will be perfect for capturing the moon rising against the beautiful Pittsburgh skyline. The full moon is also a perfect time to photograph any city as it balances the sky and bright city lights. We’ll challenge you to capture the essence of the Steel City and the many ways the rivers flow.

What You Should Know

Participants must have at least basic photo skills, know their cameras well, and be comfortable shooting RAW in manual mode with a DSLR or high-end mirrorless camera.

Night photography experience is not necessary, but even folks with extensive experience shooting at night will find this class challenging, stimulating and inspiring. For more advanced night photographers, we can offer specific challenges and goals, and will offer guidance in the field if you mainly want to concentrate on creating portfolio images or learning more advanced techniques.

If you would like to attend this workshop but are unsure whether you have adequate night photography skills, we can offer pre-workshop tutoring to get you ready for your adventure with us. Alternatively or additionally, a few of us have written books that may be productive pre-workshop reads.

What You Will Learn

We hope to push you to step outside your comfort zone—to test the limits of what you and your camera can do. You’ll go home after this workshop with a solid grasp of how to create outstanding cityscapes at night and a good foundation in light painting techniques.

TOPICS COVERED WILL INCLUDE:

• how to scout urban locations and use PhotoPills to align the moon with iconic subjects

• how to light paint the dark industrial interiors of Carrie Furnaces

• how to make urban star trails

• how to take advantage of twilight to balance the city lights in an exposure

• how to create car trails and emphasize other movement in the city

• how to use neutral density filters during the day and night for creative effect

• and more …

This workshop will have both field and classroom instruction. We will be in the field at different locations each night. Participants can stay out shooting as long as they, or their camera’s batteries, hold out. While in the field, the instructors will demonstrate their own techniques, and work with participants one-on-one to make sure everyone gets the most out of the workshop. During classroom sessions there will be presentations by the instructors, but we will focus on developing your images and sharing everyone’s work and ideas with each other.

Our locations have generous room to explore, so everyone will be able to spread out and not get in one another’s way. Each participant will have the opportunity to work one-on-one with Gabe and Lance in the field.

We do not tell our attendees what to photograph, and won’t line you up in a row to all shoot the same thing (unless it’s helpful to get some people on track). Instead, we encourage you to use what you have learned to create your own unique images, and to let us guide you through the process should you desire. We do not teach you to do what we do, but rather how to develop your own night vision.

Night Conditions

Logistics & General Info

Coming Home-stead ...

My wife, Nancy, is a proud Steel-town girl. Mention the colors black and gold, and she’ll light up. My first visit to the ‘Burgh was in 1999 and we try to go back at least twice a year.

I was blown away on my first visits by these three elements:

1. The hills. Pittsburgh far surpasses my old home of San Francisco as the hilliest city in the U.S. This lends itself to many vantage points along the confluence of the three rivers.

2. The confluence of the three rivers. The Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio can be enjoyed from the many overlooks, ground level at The Point, the waterfront or the many bridges that traverse over them.

3. Old and new architecture that makes you feel like you’re in Europe. The Late Gothic Revival Cathedral of Learning is the tallest educational building in the Western Hemisphere. The Neo-Medieval Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail make you feel like you are in Venice. Historic churches and theaters stand under the shadows of the new modern skyline of the U.S. Steel Tower, PPG Place and BNY Mellon.

Most of these elements are downtown. But Pittsburgh is also made up of 90 neighborhoods that go well beyond the Golden Triangle of The Point and Downtown.

My mission to explore each of these neighborhoods was kickstarted on my first visit to the suburb of Homestead. Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick laid the industrial groundwork to the Homestead Steel Works, which gained international notoriety with the Homestead Strike of 1892. On my first visit for a family gathering, I fell in love with the Homestead Bridge and the Waterfront that had kept many of the old brick smokestacks up as a monument to their industrial past.

On later visits I would walk along the Monongahela, or “Mon,” and photograph the Pump House and Water Tower and Pinkerton Landing Bridge, and then I discovered the Homestead Labyrinth in the snow. Across the river from the Pump House lies the remnant of Carnegie’s once-massive Carrie Blast Furnaces. From a distance, it looks operational. The train-only Hot Metal Bridge connects Homestead to the steel town of Braddock, and I knew I had to keep walking, continuing this journey of discovering new places.

I saddled up to the Braddock local bar, Peppers N’AT, as I awaited my scheduled time to scout Carrie Furnaces that night. The gentleman next to me, John, complimented my hat and we started up a conversation. His Grandfather lived a few blocks away and used to walk to work at Carrie Furnaces 50 years prior.

Turns out that John was a surveyor and one of the coolest places he had surveyed was Carrie, 20 years after it had closed its doors. When I asked John what other places he had surveyed that were cooler than Carrie, he mentioned two: the Parthenon in Athens and the tomb of Ramses II in Egypt.

Wow. That’s pretty epic.