Category Archives: Photographs: Urban/Street

Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Urban/Street

Digital Printing

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Digital Printing
Wall and sidewalk of a building advertising “digital printing.”

Digital Printing. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Wall and sidewalk of a building advertising “digital printing.”

Sometimes I wonder what people must think if they happen to notice me making street photographs. Take this image for example. I was walking with some sense of purpose back towards the 4th and Townsend Caltrain station, where I would pick up a train heading back down the peninsula following a morning of photography in San Francisco. In a location where most people are similarly focused on getting from point A to point B, usually with heads down, I suddenly stopped, stepped off the sidewalk… and photographed the wall of a nondescript building.

This photograph may be the urban equivalent of the “intimate landscape” image — I certainly think of photographs like this as being landscapes, and this one zeroes in on a very small area of a subject that folks overlook. Being a photographer who prints digitally, the “digital printing” sign had caught my eye when I passed by here a few hours earlier. Now I saw the soft light on the scene, the weathered quality of the wall, the geometry of the subject, and the relationship between the blue bar at the top and the blue quality of the light on the sidewalk.

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: San Francisco, Photographs: Urban/Street

Climbing The Stairs

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Climbing The Stairs
A woman slowly climbs stairs near the entrance to a tunnel, San Francisco

Climbing The Stairs. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A woman slowly climbs stairs near the entrance to a tunnel, San Francisco.

The last time I took one of my quick trips to San Francisco to do street photography was months ago, and I’ve been planning recently to get back up there. Yesterday I finally found time. My photographic ritual there is pretty straightforward: I get up very early and catch a train up the Peninsula, typically arriving by about 7:00am. I travel light, with only the gear that will fit in a very small shoulder bag that doesn’t really look like camera gear. I walk, and this time I wandered close to eight miles over the course of about four hours, traveling through some areas that are run down in interesting ways, through the center of the financial district, and into the Columbus and Grant and Stockton streets areaI.

I enjoy street photography for several reasons. To be honest, as much as I love the natural world, I also love cities, and even more I love wandering through them on foot. Photographically-speaking, they provide a rich lab environment for finding compositions, color, people, and more. Street photography is usually be done unencumbered by the bulky gear I often use for landscapes, and I love the spontaneous aspects of it. This photograph embodies a number of things that I look for when photographing street. I’m always attracted by color and patterns and light — and this scene just inside the end of a tunnel is full of all of these things.

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: Netherlands, Photographs: Travel, Photographs: Urban/Street

Rainy Evening, Amsterdam

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Rainy Evening, Amsterdam
Pedestrians walk along a narrow Amsterdam brick street on a rainy evening

Rainy Evening, Amsterdam. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Pedestrians walk along a narrow Amsterdam brick street on a rainy evening

This was our first day in Amsterdam, on our first visit to this city. We arrived by train from London, got there in the afternoon, went to our hotel to get settled in, and then it was time to begin our explorations and to get something to eat. Our hotel was just outside of the very busy central area of Amsterdam, so we had to walk a few blocks first before we entered the familiar narrow and curving streets… and for the first time saw the busy crowds, scores of bicycles, and more.

It was a slightly wet evening — no hard rain, but enough to dampen the pavement and create reflections. The darkened, cloudy skies and the late hour limited the light, which always has the nice effect of making illuminated signs a bit more visible, but without blowing them out as can happen at night. Our first impression on entering this area was that we could just walk up the center of the street. That turned out to be sort of true, but there’s more to it than that in Amsterdam. Lots of different types of traffic share these streets — the ubiquitous bicycles, pedestrians, occasional scooters and cars — and it turns out that there are some rules and expectations about who goes where. If you haven’t been there before, I’ll just say, “Watch out for bicycles!”

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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Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

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

Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: England, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Travel, Photographs: Urban/Street

Blue Door

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Blue Door
A blue door in gentle light and surrounded by a monumental door frame, London

Blue Door. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A blue door in gentle light and surrounded by a monumental door frame, London

A door, somewhere in London, but I’m now not sure where! I could probably come closer to locating it if I were to go back through the rest of the raw files from this day, but I think it may have been near our hotel, which was a short walk from Paddington Station and not far at all from Hyde Park. I know that we went out more than once for walks in this area, including the morning when I believe I made the photograph.

The doorway seems remarkable to me in several ways. The huge framing is quite something, and not much at all like anything you would typically see in the US, at least not in my part of the country. The frame is so monumental that it has the effect of either making the doorway seem twice as large as it really is… or of making the actual door seem very small. The color of the door is beautiful and something of a surprise given the other colors in the scene. And the light striking the door obliquely from the left seems very beautiful to me.

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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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