Category Archives: Photographs: Structures and Objects

Photographs: Night, Photographs: Structures and Objects

Support Columns, Purple and Green Wall

March 16, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Night photograph of dilapidated building in green and purple, Mare Island Naval Ship Yard.

In contrast to the huge and somewhat garishly lit iconic towers and cranes of Mare Island, there are innumerable little quiet and hidden subjects to photograph. I think that most of us start with the obvious subjects and eventually, after shooting them many times, begin to look for these other possibilities. I photographed this in very low light, complicated by a bit of wind, and I could barely see the subject as I worked. (In order to focus I had to shine a small light on the edge of part of the structure.)

The colors were almost a bit of a surprise. At Mare Island there (or, in too many cases used to be, now that the lighting has been “modernized”) a wild variation in lighting types. There is often the moonlight. A glow comes across the water from Vallejo. Sodium vapor lamps can produce a sort of sickly yellow color. Tungsten light is warm colored, and fluorescent light can be very strange. As a consequence, the colors of this nighttime world are more about the colors of the lighting than the colors of the subjects themselves. The side of this building, which is probably quite drab in daylight, picked up subtle green and purple tones under the artificial light.

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

Photographs: Night, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Structures and Objects

D4 — Do It Safe

March 14, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Two shipyard cranes, Mare Island Naval Ship Yard

This past weekend I joined my friends from The Nocturnes, the San Francisco Bay Area night photography group for a night photographing at the historic Mare Island Naval Ship Yard. (Despite the similar names, this is a different group than Studio Nocturne SF, a group of photographers with whom I exhibit.) The location is a bit of a Mecca for night photography around here, and I’ve been photographing in this place for something like a dozen years, virtually always at night.

On this shoot I focused on a combination of some less obvious things that I’ve learned to see over many years of working this subject and some of the classic, iconic subjects at Mare Island. This photograph is in the latter category. These huge cranes, set on a system of tracks surrounding dry docks, are perhaps the most characteristic visual feature of Mare Island, especially since they tower high above the old historic buildings. My night photographs of this subject don’t exactly strive for an accurate image. To be honest, that would be an incredibly boring thing, since there is so little light that the subject is often barely visible on the scene. So my idea is to focus on “what the camera sees,” and I typically make very long exposures that collect enough of that faint light to make the subject more clearly visible.

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

Photographs: Southern California, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Shop Window, Shadows

March 9, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Afternoon sun casts shadows on display in a shop window

We headed to Southern California just after the New Year. It was an excuse to take the Pacific Coast Highway down the California coast — we were fortunate to do this before winter storms forced a long-term closure! — and to visit various family members. Between the scheduled events we wandered a bit and visited whatever nearby thing seemed interesting.

We spent this afternoon wandering downtown Pasadena. It was a fairly lazy day — we had the afternoon pretty much free, with nothing on the calendar but an evening get-together. I made this photograph as the low-angle afternoon winter light slanted across the street and through the windows of this store to produce complex patterns of reflections, text, and the store’s interior.

Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Building, Reflections

March 5, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Portions of downtown San Francisco reflected in the windows of a tall building

This is an urban landscape photograph — while the subject is quite different from natural landscapes, I think of it is ways that are at least partially similar. Superficially, the urban world of towers and canyons presents some possibilities that are related to the mountains and valleys that I photograph in the non-urban world; I think about light and form in similar ways; and the ways I view each type of landscape can’t help but inform how I view the other.

It was only a few years ago when I understood something that intrigues me about glass-covered buildings like this one. (Yes, I’m slow sometimes…) We feel like we are looking at a building in a photograph like this, but a good part of what we actually see is not the building at all, but its form made visible by means of reflections of its surroundings, including other buildings and the sky. Here some skeletal forms help define its shape, perhaps more so than with some other buildings, but between those elements the windows themselves mostly reflect things that are not the building itself

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Category Archives: Photographs: Structures and Objects

Support Columns, Purple and Green Wall

D4 — Do It Safe

Shop Window, Shadows

Building, Reflections

Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.