Woman at Crosswalk. San Francisco, California. September 5, 2015. © Copyright 2015 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
A women waits alone at a crosswalk for the light to change, San Francisco.
One thing that might surprise some folks about my street photograph is that I do not think that it is unrelated to my nature and landscape photography. I think that it all connects together as “photography,” whether the subject is a mountain or a building, a bird or a person. I also believe that photographing more than one type of subject — which some might regard as a dilution of vision — actually makes me better at seeing all kinds of subjects as photographs. Shooting street, where things often happen quite quickly and in the midst of a lot of visual stimuli, forces me to be “on” all the time, to see potential subjects quickly, to recognize things that work instinctively, and to look for juxtapositions. And photographing natural landscape subjects informs the way I see the urban landscape.
One obvious potential thread in urban photograph is the juxtaposition of individual figures against a constructed and sometimes massive and impersonal urban landscape. I often look for these “stages” and then watch for people to appear and populate them. This location can actually be a fairly busy street corner, but here I first found the massive stone building, then waited for the scene to clear with the exception of the solitary woman waiting for the light.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.