Walking Man, Blue Building. San Francisco, California. May 31, 2013. © Copyright 2013 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
A man walks into the sun in front of a blue building, San Francisco, California
This building is, indeed, very blue. I passed it in the low angle morning light shortly after getting off the Caltrain and starting to walk up into the City. The area along Fourth Street seems to change each time I visit and the balance between very funky old businesses and so forth versus newer and slightly hipper stuff continues to shift toward the latter. I’m not sure what this building is, but I’m pretty certain that it is no longer some sort of garage or mechanical shop.
The first thing that caught my attention about this building was, no surprise, the blue color. I thought about how I could arrange the components of the shot to include only blue and white elements, but given the lens I was working with and a few other factors, that wasn’t possible – so there is a bit of brick wall at the upper right intruding into the blue sky. I’m starting to like it. Two other things that I saw here were the angled shadow and the trash collection bins. The two of them and the square shadow on the roll-up door seem to create a sort of pattern, and the walking person – also in a dark jacket and with a shadow, seems to bisect the space between the far right shadow and the middle bin. Without the figure, the shot didn’t seem all that interesting to me, so I employed a technique I often use when shooting urban subjects like this: compose and wait for something/someone to walk into the frame.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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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.
The brick also adds another angle that works well with the foreground shadow. Seems like all lines lead to the left, which is in accord with the man’s walking direction and ultimately lands us on the tree shadow, which is interesting too.
Thanks, David. Some might find it odd that a “landscape guy” is attracted to street shooting, and I’ve thought a bit about why this might be. The full answer is too involved for a comment thread like this one, but I’ll share a few quick thoughts.
To some extent I partially approach street shooting in ways that are not entirely different from how I approach landscape photography – I’m always looking at lines (as you mentioned) and juxtapositions of shape and color, and at light. To some extent, the challenge of “urban landscape” is that you see so many such things so quickly, as opposed to the landscape where they tend to (though don’t always) come in smaller numbers and perhaps last a bit longer.
I like working to see compositions appear and disappear quickly, and this happens almost continually when I’m focused on street photography. Often things happen so quickly that I cannot react fast enough, and in many other cases I get perhaps only a single quick chance. For any photographer, I think this kind of shooting can hone the ability to see. (That is not at all to denigrate the ability to see deeply when there is more time to work with a subject.)
In this shot I first say this very blue building with its geometric forms and simultaneously saw the brilliant morning light that was shining on its edgy forms. I found a quick composition that included the parts of the building that I though might work (and excluded some that didn’t) and then spent a few moments waiting for a passerby to add a point of focus to the scene.
There are a lot of little things in this scene that others might or might not see. For example, I was thinking about the spacing among the two black bins in front of the walker, the walker himself, and the shadow on the wall at the far right. The scene also consists – with the exception of the diagonal shadow – of a lot of rectangular shapes, from small to large. And with the exception of the triangle of brick wall at upper right, essentially everything else is some shade of blue, ranging from the very slightly blue of the white-painted surfaces to the very slight blue of the areas that seem black. Also, aside from the person, the only the thing remotely natural in the scene is the shadow of a tree at the far left.
Dan