Facades of residential buildings along a hilly street in downtown San Francisco.
With all of the landscape and nature photography I’ve posted recently, I figured it was time for something different. This is a street scene in San Francisco I photographed on a quick walk on an early March day in 2010. Many of the other photographs I made in this area included people, but it this one I wanted to isolate the fronts of the buildings, especially the contrast between the relatively fixed-up one on the left and the more weathered one on the right.
A stripe of bright red tiles and dilapidated doors in San Franciso’s Mission District.
This photograph was made early in 2010, and is one that I dredged up from the “archives” during the year-end process of reviewing all of my thousands of 2010 raw files. I had been in San Francisco with some spare time and I found myself in the Mission. This area is a great resource for photography, so I set out on foot to look for subjects along the crowded streets of this neighborhood. A small girl behind the heavy screen door on the left (barely visible in this photograph) first caught my attention, but I also found the juxtaposition of horizontal and vertical lines interesting along with the very weathered and distressed doors and walls. The thin line of brilliant red tiles was striking against the dark and dingy background.
Black and white photograph of narrow urban canyon that is Maiden Lake, in the financial district of New York City.
This street scene is in lower Manhattan, not far from the site of the World Trade Center towers. The morning light seems especially interesting on this curving street as the sun manages to penetrate all the way to the street level and the illuminated fronts of the buildings lining the “concrete canyon” are visible due to the curve.
This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
Morning fog clears from the North Tower of the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, California.
Last week I made a quick trip north of San Francisco to photograph in the morning at Muir Woods National Monument in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. My habit is to be on the road early enough to arrive at Muir Woods before the crowds arrive, and this almost always means that I cross the Golden Gate quite early in the morning, sometimes at dawn and sometimes a bit later. As I go across the bridge I keep my eyes open for special or unusual conditions – I no longer stop every time, but I do if the scene looks more interesting than usual.
This morning was unusual. It was extremely hot and dry inland, yet the offshore fog bank was making a valiant (and ultimately unsuccessful) effort to push its way through the Golden Gate past the bridge. The fog was not deep and it could only sustain itself where there was plenty of water or as it passed directly over the hills on either side of the entrance to the Bay. This meant that light was coming through the fog and it was intermittently coming and going along the edge of its incursion into the warmer air. So, I stopped.
This photograph looks back across a section of the bay that is fog covered and brightly back lit by the morning light, with the higher fog trying to push across the shoulder of the hills of the Marin headlands with the distant view of the San Francisco skyline beyond.
On a technical note, I used a 50mm prime lens for this photograph – the Canon EF 50mm f/1.4. I switched to the prime from my more typical zoom for several reasons. First, this composition seemed to work with the 50mm focal length. Second, this 50mm prime is a really excellent lens for landscape and similar work, providing outstanding resolution at the apertures typically used. Finally, I had the luxury of not having to work quickly – so I could rely on a prime with the “right” focal length rather than working with the zoom.
This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
