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Photographer Dave DiCello photographs the Pittsburgh skyline from the North Shore on Wednesday, Dec. 16, 2020.
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As the sun rises on Pittsburgh's 2021, Dave DiCello is there to photograph it

Andrew Rush/Post-Gazette

As the sun rises on Pittsburgh's 2021, Dave DiCello is there to photograph it

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When Patti Bernett takes her daily scroll through Facebook, she does so hoping to see the newest photographs on Dave DiCello’s page. Though she’s lived outside Atlanta for the past 37 years, one glance at the right image and she’s transported to her family’s 1960s Dodge station wagon. With her parents and three siblings spread out over three bench seats, they’d roll below Pittsburgh inclines on drives from their McKees Rocks home to visit family east of the city.

That rush of nostalgia overtook Ms. Bernett, 66, recently when Mr. DiCello posted a snowy image of the Duquesne Incline to his social media platforms. With the red and yellow of the incline car contrasted starkly against the surrounding white, Ms. Bernett, who has avoided travel due to the pandemic, was moved to comment.

“I’m so sad to have to stay away this year, but your photos help so much,” she posted on Facebook, where 106,000-plus followers could read it.

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Mr. DiCello is one of Pittsburgh’s most recognizable landscape photographers, capturing every icon and mundane detail of the city with his signature style. His images have become kindling to the city’s bonfire of self-love. His work is regularly included in local news broadcasts and occasionally reaches a national stage. Local reader polls recognize him year after year. But it’s comments from the likes of Ms. Bernett that keep his alarm going off well before sunrise each day to chase the next iconic Pittsburgh frame.

“What I have learned and what really sticks with me in this photographic journey, if you’ve lived in Pittsburgh for a week or if you’ve lived here for 80 years, this city just becomes a part of you in some way,” Mr. DiCello said. “There’s no greater compliment to me that someone wants to live a happy part of their life through my images.”

The mental picture show that can be triggered by a single image is not only something he provides but also something he’s experienced.

His father was an amateur photographer, spending most of his time on landscapes and family photos. One such image — a sunset framed within Point State Park’s fountain — has hung on the wall of Mr. DiCello’s childhood home in Bethel Park for the past 30 years. Maybe it’s the change in technology or the use of film, but the image is his Holy Grail.

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“Every time I’m [at The Point] at sunset, I think of that image, and I can see it in my head because I saw it every day of my life growing up,” he said. “I’ve said, ‘I think this is close,’ but then I go back to the picture, and it’s just not the same. I just can’t emulate it.”

Putting in the work

The tension between a visualized image and the final product might be the secret ingredient to Mr. DiCello’s distinctive images.

He first expressed his artistic gifts as a child with cartoon sketches, some of which he’d try to sell door to door. Even now, he has a sketchbook full of hand-drawn “Star Wars” characters and routinely draws with his two kids — Declan, 6, and Delaney, 2. He and his wife, Dana, collect satirical Pittsburgh prints, like one of Fred Rogers covered in tattoos, which hang on the walls of their Mt. Lebanon home.

In a way, it all frustrates him.

“I’m always so jealous of painters like Baron Batch because they can create whatever they have in their head,” he said. “Whereas me with my camera, I’m stuck with capturing what’s right in front of me. To me, that kind of puts a ceiling on my creativity.”

Still thinking like a sketch artist, he strives to visualize a photo before it’s taken. Using an incredible amount of forethought, three different apps on his iPhone and a few public video streams to tell him about sunrise, weather, phases of the moon, fog and more, he attempts to match the conditions to a mental image and location. It’s a process that begins well before sunup.

‘That big duck’

Mr. DiCello’s alarm sounds at 4:17 a.m. For many years, marathon training runs took place at that early hour, but beginning four or five years ago, those were replaced by one-on-one time with a sleeping city, viewed through a lens.

His gear is assembled the night before — memory cards wiped, lenses in their place — and he is ready to flee the house in the morning should transient weather conditions, like fog, dictate a speedy exit.

Before dawn on a 30-degree winter morning, DiCello pours out of his black Dodge Durango, gear in hand, with a quickness that betrays the regularity of the motion. He walks fast, almost racing toward the image that preoccupies him, and immediately notes the uncontrollables: The choppy water was not ideal — and unexpected due to a lack of rainfall or wind — but the wispy clouds hinted at a colorful sunrise.

He chooses a spot beneath the Roberto Clemente Bridge, which is meaningful for him: It’s the birthplace of Dave DiCello, Pittsburgh icon.

Reciting the date as easily as he can identify cherry blossom trees in the dead of winter, he remembers the weekend everything changed. It was Sept. 26 or 27, 2013, and his photography business was dominated by weddings at the time. He’d just shot a rehearsal dinner and hurried down to the Clemente Bridge to photograph the massive floating duck — courtesy of Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman — resting there, ahead of its official debut at The Point. Mr. DiCello snapped some of the first duck images to see local social media, and it set his modestly attended Facebook page pinging with over 3,000 likes and comments.

“I’m like, ‘What? It’s a duck,” he recalls. “That was the ah-ha of I should shoot stuff like this because people want to see this. That was the day that really got me all in on capturing Pittsburgh in every way.”

His lightbulb moment proved immediately fruitful. The same year, one of his lightning strike photos landed on the CBS Evening News and KDKA newscasts began regularly showing his images.

As his photos began to circulate, they caught the eye of Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto, who tends to share a handful of Mr. DiCello’s images on social media each week.

“I like the shots he takes around town and outside Downtown Pittsburgh, where he’s able to capture the treasures and gems of the city,” Mr. Peduto told the Post-Gazette. “I like seeing after I post it where people are asking, ‘Where is this?’ [They’re] discovering Pittsburgh through his lens.”

The mayor has a few personal favorites, like the different ways Mr. DiCello captures the gothic style of PPG Place and the way he highlights the Aztec gold-painted bridges in otherwise black-and-white photos. But his decision to share them publicly has more to do with their succinct portrayal of a modern Pittsburgh.

“When you’re my generation and older, Pittsburgh has an image of rusted steel town,” said Mr. Peduto. “But [Dave’s work] defines Pittsburgh for who we are today. I look for [images] that promote us for who we are and the true beauty of the city.”

Stay in your own lane

Mr. DiCello, 37, has been taking pictures since first grade, when he brought his beginner’s camera — the kind with a flash cube on the top — to show and tell. He dabbled in it until a new camera after college caused him to experiment from Mount Washington. Immune to any idea that he “should” shoot more, he snapped just two photos and excitedly headed home immediately to process them.

Over a decade later, he stays just as focused on his own path.

“I don’t view photography as a competition,” he said. “I’ve met other photographers who’ve said, ‘You’re my competition,’ and I say back, ‘In what way?’ How do you be better than someone else at art?”

The recent winter morning below the Clemente Bridge was one of his first outings with a new camera. He thought aloud, noting the learning curve inherent in a new device. This one lacked an internal mirror, which changes the rhythm of how he captures a view. It jogged his memory about other changes in his process.

“You think you know everything; now I realize I know nothing,” he said. “I used to spend an hour editing an image, and I’d think, ‘This picture is so good because it took me so long to edit.’ Then I realized if you’re taking an hour to edit, you’re probably not doing it right.”

He knows he’s occasionally accused of using Photoshop on his images because of their otherworldly swirls of color or perception-bending reflections. But he acknowledges it with a laugh and the correction that most of his images take maybe three minutes to edit.

“I think a lot about why other people might not have the audience that I do is that they are thinking about it the wrong way,” he said. “They’re trying to be better than someone else. I’ve always said what my dad instilled in me, ‘Don’t try to be better than someone else. Be better than who you were yesterday.’ That’s what I try to do. I try to get better technically, artistically than myself.”

‘Just’ a dad

There’s a faded bouncy ball with an alien’s face that sits on Mr. DiCello’s desk at home. Earned at a ringtoss game in Ocean City a few years ago, it was the first carnival trinket his son ever won on his own. The ball was lost in their yard two years ago but then was rediscovered this summer. It doesn’t glow anymore, and it’s kind of scuffed up, but he won’t get rid of it.

The ball is as close as Mr. DiCello can get to a memory he wishes to hold close, serving much of the same purpose as his images do for others.

From that desk, he works the finance day job he has no intention of leaving, edits images and manages the business portion of his photography work, which is now mostly online prints sales after the closing of his retail store in the Highmark Building, Downtown. He’s pursuing a video series, “Behind the Lens,” with Pittsburgh photographer and videographer Jake Mysliwczyk and another photography project, which plays with perspectives on the same space, with local photographer Alex Mowry. Though he pleases Pittsburghers, near and far, with his newest images — each routinely earning several thousand likes — he doesn’t think of himself as a famous artist.

“I do this on the side,” he said. “I do this for fun. I’m fortunate to make some money off of it, but in my mind, I’m a dad who works in corporate America. It doesn’t sink in yet.”

Turning the page

Though Mr. DiCello doesn’t believe in the “new year, new you” way of thinking, New Year's Eve and New Year’s Day photo excursions are an annual exercise.

“There is something to be said for capturing a moment that you can only capture one time a year,” he said. “It’s a last and first kind of thing.” 

This year was extraordinary.

The hardships of 2020 made people yearn for 2021’s blank page, and Mother Nature delivered in dramatic fashion. An hour before sunrise on Jan. 1, the sky over Downtown was tie-dyed in orange, pink and purple. Mr. DiCello captured the image from a West End perch and shared it on his social media platforms. That image received about 10 times the usual number of shares on Facebook.

With all of his art, he aims to provide inspiration and a feeling of connection. That’s why he decided in March to keep his social media pages free of politics and other potential heaviness such as COVID-19. Though that month, he did post an image that showed his son riding his bike down a suburban street, and the caption urged support for neighbors, small businesses and finding ways to adapt.

“We don’t know what the road looks like ahead, but my plan is to capture as many images of the city as I can, as that’s my way of feeling as ‘normal’ as possible,” he wrote on social media.

He takes comments from Ms. Bernett and others to heart. They validate the decision to keep his pages focused on nostalgia and positivity. 

“I’m always going to be chasing the snow storms, chasing the lightning, chasing the rainbows, chasing the sunrises, chasing the frozen rivers, chasing everything I can because, first and foremost, I enjoy it, and I truly enjoy sharing the city. I am so fortunate to be able to share it with so many people. I don’t see any reason to change my mindset behind that.”

Abby Mackey: abbyrose.mackey@gmail.com, Twitter @AnthroAbbyRN and IG @abbymackeywrites.

First Published: January 17, 2021, 5:30 a.m.

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Pittsburgh photographer Dave DiCello captured this shot of Downtown on New Year's Day 2021 and posted on Facebook, "“Happy New Year everyone! I hope that everyone had a fun and safe time celebrating last night! As I do every year, I headed into Pittsburgh to capture the very first sunrise of the year. Sometimes it's a bust, sometimes it's okay, but there's something about capturing the very first sunrise of the year that I really enjoy. This year's sunrise was...my goodness. What a way to start the year. The funny thing was, the best color was nearly an hour before sunrise, but at the peak color it was absolutely incredible. Pinks and purples filled the sky, and with the tree at the Point and city glowing, was just the perfect way to start the new year.”  (Dave DiCello)
Andrew Rush/Post-Gazette
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