When I was young I loved looking at city skylines. While I was fortunate enough to see two great skylines (Philadelphia and New York) relatively often, I always wanted to see others. I had a set of puzzles of major US cities that showed these skylines. Two really caught my eye – San Francisco because of the Transamerica Pyramid and Pittsburgh.

The Pittsburgh skyline is neat because of the city’s position at the confluence of two rivers surrounded by yellow bridges and the castle-like PPG Place tower. Surprisingly I never made it to Pittsburgh until this year.

Behind the scenes, this picture not only represents one that I always wanted to take, but also a shot I took with my family standing behind me. We had a wonderful time in Pittsburgh and this picture brings back memories of laughs while seeing the sights and tasting the local food.

I spent a long time, about 2 hours, in this position taking a number of pictures with different settings. I used a tripod and an ND filter to get a longer exposure time and did manipulate the image in Lightroom to bring out details. This particular picture wasn’t striking in color, but converting to B&W really made it stunning and one of my favorites so far. I am sure there are more Pittsburgh pictures to come.

Camera: Canon 600D
Lens: Sigma 24mm
Aperture: f/5.0
Shutter Speed: 1/160
ISO:200
Postprocessing: Lightroom