Category Archives: Photographs: Urban/Street

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

The Lake, Central Park

December 10, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Summer boaters on The Lake, Central Park, Manhattan

After watching a friend take on the task of posting a continuous string of black and white photographs during the holiday season this year, I have posted more monochrome photographs than usual, with a number of them coming from a backlog of older work that sits in the raw file archives. This has provided a bit of a necessary nudge to go back and revisit some of those older photographs. I haven’t taken a very systematic approach to this nostalgic review of the older work, instead almost randomly dropping in on the files from different years and subjects. A recent look at some older Sierra Nevada photographs took me back to 2010, and it wasn’t a long trip from there to a collection of photographs from a summer 2010 visit to New York City.

I think that 2010 was the first time I visited New York City in August. New Yorkers are perhaps rolling their eyes, knowing all about August weather there, but I was innocent. Now I know. (And, strange as it seems, I actually chose to go back this past August! I’m starting to get used to it and to perhaps even embrace the heat and humidity.) The Central Park location of this photograph is probably fairly obvious — we wandered through portions of the park and ended up near The Lake, where park visitors rowed slowly and serenely within sight of Manhattan’s urban buildings.

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Photographs: Chicago, Photographs: Urban/Street

Reflections, Chicago

December 7, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Distorted reflections on Chicago downtown building windows

Once you start looking at the windows of modern urban towers, you begin to see them in a very different way. Instead of seeming like isolated structures or merely individual architectural forms, they start to relate to their surroundings and to take on changing and whimsical qualities. I first noticed this on my many trips up to San Francisco to photograph in the downtown area, where I became more and more aware of the reflections and the ways that light plays across the buildings and reflects down to the street level from their glass surfaces.

This was a handheld “grab” from the boat on the Chicago architecture cruise we took early one morning. In a way I wish that I had carried a longer lens so that I could have isolated the wild reflections on either the right or the left side, but since I couldn’t I instead decided to go ahead and split them with the section of reflected blue sky.

Photographs: Chicago, Photographs: Urban/Street

Dissipating Structures

November 8, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Distorted reflections of a crane and Chicago buildings

Every so often I wonder about architects. For the most part we think of them — or at least I do — as folks who are as much about logic and structure as they are about design and form, and when they are about design they don’t usually seem to be particularly whimsical. (With notable exceptions.) Whimsical doesn’t fit the image or the expectations of the typical big business clients who might commission such towers as those found in an urban center like Chicago — these see like people who are more interested in cultivating an image of stability and wealth and power.

But then I look at the window reflections that are the inevitable result of placing plexiglas covered buildings in close proximity to one another and I have to wonder. Are these folk aware of the almost hallucinogenic shapes and forms that appear on the sides of these buildings? In fact, how many people on the streets are away of the abstract and bizarre visual show that is often going on overhead? Here, against the clean and mathematically perfect face of this building, neatly divided into equal grids of alternating shades of blue, appear bizarre visual monstrosities. A red construction crane warps upwards and leans precariously to the right as its upper elements simply fall apart into twists and curlicues. Sections of the reflected buildings are alternately minimized and expanded to gross degrees, and if you look closely at the resulting patterns you might find anything from aerial fish to faces to whatever else you want to imagine.

Photographs: Chicago, Photographs: Urban/Street

Urban Flower Hunter

November 2, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Photographing flowers in a Chicago urban garden

In this photograph a woman kneels to make close-up photographs of flowers in an urban garden at Chicago’s Millennium Park. Not just any woman, by the way, but my wife! Aside from that obvious factor, there are several other things that I like about this scene and this photograph, some of them photographic and others more about the facts of the image.

Most people would pass right by such an urban garden. Some will notice it and perhaps look a bit. But a person who stops and looks close, as Patty does, can find a whole world to see in such a small place. In this photograph I also like the juxtaposition of the sharp angles and structures of the downtown Chicago skyline, with colors muted by hazy afternoon, and the wild and unpredictable organic forms and colors of the bit of garden. It doesn’t hurt that her red top complements the greens, either!

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Category Archives: Photographs: Urban/Street

The Lake, Central Park

Reflections, Chicago

Dissipating Structures

Urban Flower Hunter

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