Category Archives: Photographs: England

Photographs: England, Photographs: People, Photographs: Urban/Street

Colchester Billiards & Snooker Club

December 18, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A few people stand outside the Colchester Billiards and Snooker Club along a narrow curving street

During our lengthy travels (five weeks on the road!) this past summer we spent a bit more than a week in London. While most of our plans were in London, we decided to get out into the country at least once on this trip. So, more or less on a whim, we decided to take the train to the town of Colchester after reading a brief entry about it on some website or similar. (In some ways we are fans of injecting a bit of randomness into our trip planning — we often discover interesting things that way.)

Colchester is a smallish town at more or less the end of a spur railroad line. It obviously attracts a certain number of tourists, perhaps day trippers from London, since it has a number of shops and places to eat and so forth. It also has a few historic structures including a castle (of course!) and a very old church. On the other hand, it also features some mundane things — we saw a lot of hearing aid shops! Up this narrow, curving street I spotted an interesting spot of color in the green building, along with a few people populating the tables in front of the local Billiards and Snooker Club.

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

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

London Street Scene

October 30, 2016 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

People on a crowded London street

This will likely be one of those photographs that perplexes people who follow me for my nature, landscape, and wildlife photography. On the surface it seems like the virtual opposite of those photographs, but there are similarities. This is a kind of landscape — the urban landscape — and it is possible to see it in ways not that different from how we might see the natural landscape, with attention to patterns, to light, to distance and perspective, and more. And the people here are, in a sense, the “wildlife” of this urban world.

It is a little bit tricky to articulate just what I saw or see in a photograph like this. Of course, it does “record” a particular scene from a certain busy area of London. But it is also a sort of accidental tableau in which figures arrived in positions and relationships that somehow caught my attention. And, perhaps obviously, color is part of what happens in this photograph. Beyond that, I’ll leave the viewer to speculate.

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

Photographs: England, Photographs: Urban/Street

Rain, Fallen Leaves, Reflections

October 29, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A pedestrian walks post a small garden in the rain near the Tate Modern, London

It may be a bit hard to see in this small version of the photograph, but the walkway, made dark and reflective by light rain, is covered by a universe of small leaves that have fallen from the row of trees that stretches to the right and out of the frame. I was also attracted by the complementary red and green colors of reflections and leaves.

The location is not far from the end of London’s Millennium Bridge and at the entrance to the Tate Modern, where we went to see a wonderful exhibit of Georgia O’Keeffe paintings. (And, yes, it did seem slightly strange to be visiting the exhibit of this American painter in a British museum.)

Photographs: England, Photographs: Urban/Street, Photographs: Utah

Walking Man, Mirrored Wall

September 30, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A walking man and other people are reflected in a mirrored wall, London

Here we have (yet another!) photograph of someone using a smart phone in the urban world, though here there are, I think, a few other elements that got my attention. I’m sure that I was paying attention to the continuous stream of people moving along this sidewalk, and I like to think that some sense of their motion comes through in the photograph. The mirrored wall that contains most of the subjects not only let me capture a “double” of the primary subject, but it also let me bring him forward from the reflected background of all the other people who are only visible in the mirrored image. You might also notice some interesting things related to color.

And there are some surprises. I read somewhere that one of the differences between painting and photography is that while the painter personally puts everything on the canvas (at least mostly) and therefore can know it fully, the photographer cannot possibly know every element of the scene. In fact it is common to only realize that the photograph contains unintentional elements after the fact. One of those is present here — look at the head of the man in his reflected image.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Category Archives: Photographs: England

Colchester Billiards & Snooker Club

London Street Scene

Rain, Fallen Leaves, Reflections

Walking Man, Mirrored Wall

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