Ten FLoors Down: A View Inside Pittsburgh’s Union Trust Building

Earlier this month, I had just wrapped photographing Laurel Highlands High School’s production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. After several days inside a theater surrounded by stage lights, orchestra pits, and quick costume changes, my brain was already fully dialed into stage mode.

It was fortuitous timing because the Duquesne University Opera Workshop was getting ready to put on their production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and I was on hand at their dress rehearsal to capture photos. So when I arrived at Pittsburgh’s historic Union Trust Building, I was already in that “stage” mindset.

Working these projects for Duquesne is a little different than a typical client shoot, though. In this case, I am not just the photographer—I’m also a client.

The images I make during these rehearsals are the ones that end up everywhere afterward. They become the photos that are used on the Mary Pappert School of Music website, on social media, in concert promotions, and in marketing materials that help recruit the next generation of musicians who will eventually step onto those stages themselves.

That changes how I approach the shoot on a fundamental level. There are no client calls or consultations beforehand because I already know exactly what the photos need to accomplish. I know the website layouts they will live in, the social posts they will anchor, and the kinds of images that resonate with prospective students when they are deciding where to study music.

The Union Trust Building, however, has a way of distracting you from your plan. If you have ever stepped inside, you know exactly what I mean. Marble walls, ornate railings, and a dramatic circular atrium that opens the whole way to the top through the center of the building. Floor after floor wraps around that open space, creating a vertical view that feels almost theatrical itself.

Most of the time when I am photographing a performance like this, the stage holds all of the attention, with the costumes, set pieces, and lighting working together to accentuate the mood of the scene. You know, the part where I’m supposed to tell the story with silent 2D images…

But one of the realities of working as a photographer is that the best image of the night sometimes happens somewhere completely different.

The theater sits on the tenth floor, with a balcony accessible on the eleventh, near the top of the building. Ten floors above the lobby, you get the exact opposite feeling that you get when you walk in on the ground floor. That sense of rising grandeur is replaced with a scene that opened beneath me like a perfectly circular well of marble and gold. The railings wrapped around on each level, forming a stack of glowing rings that dropped all the way down to the lobby floor.

And that was when I remembered the lens sitting in my bag. Recently, I started carrying a new 10mm ultra-wide lens. One of the first times I really put it to work was during the snowstorm I wrote about in Snowmageddon’s Revenge, where the lens proved perfect for exaggerating scale and pulling an entire scene into a single dramatic frame. (I’m also excited to return to Red Caiman Studios this spring for a second round of studio photos.) Standing there at the railing of the Union Trust atrium, it was immediately obvious that the lens had found its next assignment. So, during a rehearsal break, I stepped out onto the balcony overlooking the atrium with the 10mm.

I’m not big on heights. Never have been. But I recognized the potential for the shot, and that outweighed my fear of plunging to my death. So, I very carefully leaned over the railing on the tenth floor and pointed the camera down. It was attached to a strap wrapped around my body so I wouldn’t accidentally drop it. But if it did go down somehow, that probably meant that I was going with it. Fun!

The risk was totally worth it. From that height, the architecture compresses into pure geometry. The warm gold railings form a series of concentric rings that make you feel like you’re falling into the picture. The marble walkways become bright bands of light circling the void. Nearly a hundred feet below, the deep blue lobby carpet anchors everything like the center of a target.

You know the saying “They don’t make ‘em like they used to!”? Yeah, that.

It was a completely different photograph from what I went there to capture, and that’s one of the unexpected rewards of working on location. Whether I am photographing a concert, an opera rehearsal, or an event somewhere in Pittsburgh, the assignment always begins with a plan. But sometimes the images that stay with you the longest are not the ones you plan for. Sometimes they are the ones you just happen to discover while simply paying attention to the space around you.

I still had to go shoot the rest of the dress rehearsal for The Magic Flute inside the theater, but for a moment, leaning over that railing with a 10mm lens pointed straight down, the building itself stole the show. Thankfully, I didn’t break a leg photographing it.