Early Morning, San Francisco Bay. July 17, 2006. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell.

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Willie Mays Gate, SBC Park. San Francisco. July 10, 2005. © Copyright Dan Mitchell

Taken on another walk around San Francisco, this one on July 10, 2005. I wandered from the theatre district down to SBC Park, then along the waterfront to near the Ferry Building, and finally back up past Union Square.

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Golden Gate Bridge and Sailboats. July 3, 2005. © Copyright Dan Mitchell.

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Golden Gate Bridge. July 3, 2005. © Copyright Dan Mitchell.

I took this picture a couple weeks ago on a Sunday afternoon while Patty (my wife) was playing in the pit for Les Miserables. It was a sunny day in most of San Francisco, but the fog line was just inside the bridge.

This picture has undoubtedly been taken thousands (tens of thousands?) of times – go to Fort Point and go to the end of the breakwater at the right side of the fort and there is a small area just to the right of a fence. So, it is not an original but I still like it.

I did not notice the bird nicely centered in the upper section of the bridge when I took the photo. This is slightly ironic since I had tried to time several shots to intentionally include seagulls but had failed miserably.

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August 4, 2026 — Some background about this page. This website/blog (or as we called it back then, a “weblog”) came to life near the beginning of July 2005, July 3 to be precise. Within a month or two I began posting a daily photograph here, usually accompanied by commentary. The post you see above was the first photograph I shared here, Back on July 16, 2005.

I may have missed post or two during those first few months, but since that time — now over two decades — I have continued to share a new photograph every day. “Why?,” you might ask. “Surely you don’t actually think all 7000+ photographs are great, right?”

No, I don’t. (Ansel Adams is said to have stated that a dozen very good photographs in year was a good crop, so I’m not pretending that I post 365 great photographs every year.

My goals go a bit beyond that. My academic training is in music, a field in which the concept of daily “practice” is central. We don’t imagine that we can go for days or weeks or months without picking up our instruments, then suddenly produce a brilliant performance. In fact, musicians typically spend far more time practicing than performing. I think there is a parallel in photography. We usually make a lot of photographs that don’t work, others that are fine but nothing special, a smaller number of very good work, and a select few that may achieve something extra special. So one of my goals with the website from the very beginning was to expose this ongoing “practice” by sharing something every day.

Is the photograph on this page “great?” Absolutely not. (I could make it better, but I have chosen to leave this one as it was first posted.) But it is a record of a beginning and one more step along the way to developing my skills and style as a photographer.