Category Archives: Photographs: People

Photographs: France, Photographs: People, Photographs: Travel, Photographs: Urban/Street

Couple With Roller Bags

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Couple With Roller Bags
A couple of tourists pulling roller bags on a Paris sidewalk

Couple With Roller Bags. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A couple of tourists pulling roller bags on a Paris sidewalk

I photographed this couple in Le Marais, Paris, not far from where we stayed for a few days near the end of August. If I recall correctly it was Friday evening, and I suspect that these folks were just arriving for the weekend. (I could be wrong — perhaps they live here and were returning from travels.) Their appearance in this scene was fortuitous. I had noticed the monumental weathered wall in the background. I was intrigued, but it hardly seemed like a photograph by itself. But with people in the frame such a surface can add interest.

Being a relatively light travel — at least when traveling by air — I can also identify a bit with these folks. This European trip was nearly six weeks long, yet we managed to restrict ourselves to carry-on luggage — one backpack-style bag plus a smaller “camera” bag that fit under airline seats. (We cheated a bit, too. We did ship some more formal clothes ahead of time for one special event that we attended in Germany.) Even with our relatively light loads, sometimes at the end of a day of travel those bags just… weigh you down. These folks look like they just might be having a similar moment…

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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.
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Photographs: Austria, Photographs: People, Photographs: Travel, Photographs: Urban/Street

Child In The Street

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Child In The Street
A toddler walks in the street in front of arches, Vienna

Child In The Street. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A toddler walks in the street in front of arches, Vienna

There are probably multiple ways to think about this photograph. It is, obviously, a photograph of a small child in a roadway. Is the child actually alone? Why is he/she in the street? Why did I make a photograph rather than running to protect the child? I’m not going to answer those questions here — partly because I think it is better to let the viewer wonder, and partly because there is no scandal in any of the actual answers. But questions remain? What IS this child doing? What, if anything, does this mean?

On a practical note, this is an example of the sort of photograph that would be pretty much impossible to make using the equipment or techniques of my landscape and similar photography. A scene like this happens instantaneously, usually with little or no warning, and it is gone almost as soon as you see it. For this sort of thing I work with a small handheld camera with a prime lens, which lets me respond to such scenes almost without taking (much) time for conscious thought.

See top of this page for Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information and more.

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.
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All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: France, Photographs: People, Photographs: Travel, Photographs: Urban/Street

Woman and Clock

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Woman and Clock
A woman gazes through the portal of a Musee D’Orsay clock towards Paris

Woman and Clock. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A woman gazes toward the Paris skyline through the portal of a Musee D’Orsay clock

I can tell something of a story on us regarding the Musee d’Orsay. On a previous visit to Paris we were trying to get to various specific locations including a few museums. However, we can be a bit “seat of the pants” when it comes to wandering around in such cities — rather than making specific plans we tend to decide things on the spot and/or wander around and see what we find. We knew we wanted to visit this museum, but it wasn’t until later on that visit that we made it there. We paid our admission, went inside, and discovered that we had perhaps 90 minutes left before it closed. Needless to say, we moved very quickly through sections of the place and missed a ton of stuff.

This time we wanted to go back and spend a more reasonable amount of time there. And we did. We got there in time to see a good portion of the marvelous exhibits. At one point we were getting hungry, and we ran into a restaurant on one of the upper floors and decided to stop. Overlooking the restaurant was a clock like what you see here. I was very confused. I knew I had seen “the” clock briefly on the previous visit, but I didn’t recall a restaurant… so I chalked up to, “they must have remodeled things and installed this restaurant by the clock. ” We finished eating, went back to visiting the exhibits, and eventually worked our way to the far end of the floor… where we found the other clock, the one that I had seen before. Usually there are a ton of people standing in front of the thing — and who can blame them — but for a moment I was able to frame this photograph with a solitary woman standing and looking through the clock’s windows towards the skyline of Paris.

See top of this page for Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information and more.

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.
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All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Germany, Photographs: People, Photographs: Urban/Street

Red Wall

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Red Wall
A person walks in front of a painted section of the Berlin Wall

Red Wall. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A person walks in front of a painted section of the Berlin Wall

Before I say much about this photograph, a bit of background. Near the start of August 2018 we departed from California’s West Coast on a trip that would last forty days. We started with a brief visit to New York City, followed by another brief visit to London — both great places to visit and to adapt more slowly to the time zone changes. From there we made a rough loop that took us to Amsterdam, Berlin, Nuremberg (briefly!), Bayreuth (site of the famous Wagner festival), Heidelberg (for rest and recuperation… and laundry!), Vienna, Paris, and then a week outside of Paris near Barbizon with family. Whew! It was a great trip, with a few familiar places and some that were new to us. Along the way we had lots of opportunities to make photographs, and I’ll be starting to share some of them over the next few weeks and months.

We had three full days (four nights) in Berlin, a city that neither of us had visited before. We don’t travel with tour groups, so we were mostly on our own to explore, and most of our exploring was done on foot. On our last full day we headed east from where we were staying, eventually making our way to the “East Side Gallery.” This is a large section of the Berlin Wall that was not knocked down, but instead turned into a vast canvas for artists. My approach to photographing such a thing isn’t precisely to photograph the art itself, but instead to try to place it in its surroundings and/or photograph people interacting with it — which is the case with this man dressed in red who walked in front of this red section of the former “red” wall.

See top of this page for Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information and more.

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.
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All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.