Okay, everything is more of less under control except for this:

  tesseract phototest.tif - pdf > phototest.pdf

This is sending activating both the text renderer, and the pdf renderer.
They both get sent to stdout where they mix together and cause chaos.
Same thing happens with this command.

   tesseract phototest.tif stdout pdf > phototest.pdf

What's happening is tesseractmain.cpp is setting tessedit_create_pdf without
disabling tessedit_create_txt.

https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tesseract-dev/32c065ee-aefa-441a-b37b-b6bdc234c8ab%40googlegroups.com