Wooden Door, Concrete Wall. San Francisco, California. April 20, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
A wooden door in a concrete wall in an alley along The Embarcadero, San Francisco.
I’ll keep this description short since the photograph was taken in a location and circumstances that I have already described more fully. While walking along the Embarcadero on the waterfront of San Francisco I came across some alleys that had been locked up in the past and this time found them open. So I wandered down the alleys toward the water and discovered some old industrial buildings with worn doorways and walls and decided to make some photographs.
Much of this area is undergoing renovation or else being reclaimed by firms that find the slightly old-fashioned and dilapidated buildings to be picturesque and perhaps a bit trendy. Side by side with modern companies and offices there are remnants of a much different and rougher past.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
I enjoy this photo and others like it. I like the composition; I think it is more effective than having included the door in its entirety (which is likely what I would have done). There are many similar such sites in my hometown of Birmingham.
Thanks, Jeremy.
I remember when I first really made sense out of this sort of composition in a coherent and aware way – though I think I had understood it intuitively much earlier. I had been photographing redwood trees a lot and had been struggling with compositional issues – the trees are so darned tall and you often have to shoot them from such short distances! I finally figured out that a very effective way to suggest the immense size of the trees was to photograph them in one of the ways we experience them, namely in a horizontal framing and looking straight ahead, with the greater part of the trees completely out of the frame and far above. The visible portions of the trees suggest the much larger height that is not included in the frame.
Dan