Category Archives: Photographs: Urban/Street

Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: Night, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Yellow Buildings, Shadows, Moving Clouds

March 3, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

This seems to be the week for photographs involving a combination of preparation and serendipity. I made an unsuccessful attempt to photograph these buildings a year or so ago. I managed to get spooked and learn a little lesson in the process. Most of the time night photography is a quiet, peaceful, and slow experience. There are often very few other people around, and in the darkness you can be entirely alone. Much of the work is done slowly – wandering around looking for compositions in the near darkness first, and then waiting for long exposures to complete. On that first attempt with this subject I had set up in an abandoned parking lot next to these buildings and was standing quietly by my tripod when I heard the sound of a fast-moving car. A sixth sense told me to pay attention… and in seconds a car came speeding around the corner of a nearby building and into the parking lot! I don’t think I’ve ever grabbed my gear and run so fast! (The resulting photo is sort of funny and captures my panicked escape after perhaps 2/3 of the exposure had completed – the image of the buildings is there, but superimposed on it is a wild pattern of light formed as I spun around, carrying the camera without even taking time to close the shutter.)

Since then I wanted to try photographing these buildings again. Late in the evening of this recent shoot I noticed translucent clouds passing overhead. When such clouds are lit from below and have a chance to moving during long exposures they form interesting patterns. I quickly headed toward that same notorious parking lot… and this time found a safer spot on a raised sidewalk, which also gave me a better angle on the buildings. The clouds were moving away and to the right, so I had to work quickly to get set up and start exposures. The first one (not shown here) was a slightly wider shot. Then I thought about the zig-zagging angles and shapes of the buildings roof lines and corners and noticed that the same shapes were mirrored in the shadow cast by a nearby building. With this in mind I decided to try a tighter crop on the buildings, and I ended up with this photograph.

(Edited and updated in January 2025)

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Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: Night, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Shack with Red and Green Interior Lights

March 2, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

A small shack with interior lit by red and green lights at the Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, California.

At last weekend’s night photography shoot with The Nocturnes at Mare Island Naval Ship Yard I wandered a bit further afield than I have on some previous visits, eventually ending up in an area where I have only photographed once before when I unsuccessfully shot a couple of large barn-like buildings. (I think I have a shot of these buildings from this trip that I like, and I’ll post it later on.)

While spending nearly a half hour photographing a light post against the backdrop of a very dark brick building (which amounted to two photographs, given the long exposure times and the follow-up “dark frame exposures) I kept thinking I saw a faint red glow inside a small nearby building. At first I thought that one of my fellow night photographers might be doing some light painting, but the light seemed awfully dim. Eventually I noticed that it was also quite constant – and light painting virtually always involves moving the hand held light source around in order to get a smooth lighting effect. Once I finished shooting the light pole (unsuccessfully, it turns out) I decided I would go over and see what was creating this light.

The buildings appears to be a small “guard shack” or similar, a very old and very dilapidated one room structure. Inside, as best as I could tell, there is a small table, a few chairs, a digital clock of some sort with green letters, and some kind of very dim red light. Intrigued, I decided to see if I could photograph it. One technical problem was going to be the very large difference in lighting between the bright light on the clock and the extremely dim exterior, made worse by the dark color of the building. I figured that I could probably put enough extra light onto the building’s exterior using a very small key chain LED light than I happened to have with me, and that is the major source of light on the front of the building and on the yellow foreground curve – I simply walked around on both sides of the building and moved the small light over its surface.

In the end, I think this is another example of night photography as a source of a certain kind of “fantastic” lighting. The actual scene was very, very dim, and the the intensity of the colors here is almost entirely the result of the very long exposure and a bit of improvised lighting on the yellow curb behind the fence – a photograph of something that cannot be seen with our own eyes.

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Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: Night, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Textures, Photographs: Urban/Street

Brick Wall with Windows and Doors, Artificial Light

March 1, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A brick wall with windows and a door is illuminated by garish yellow artificial lighting at Mare Island Naval Ship Yard.

During the final weekend of February I was able to join my friends from The Nocturnes for an “alumni” shoot at the historic Mare Island Naval Ship Yard at Vallejo, California. I photograph at this location a few times every year – most often with The Nocturnes – and each time I go I find something new or else find a new way to photograph something familiar.

This wall is in a little side alley off or one of the main roads through the facility. Although it certainly doesn’t look like it in this photograph, this is a fairly dark area of the island where rows of large factory buildings (mostly abandoned) are lit, for the most part, by a few security lights. Standing there next to me as I made the photograph, this is not what you would have seen. At best, I could make out the shapes and arrangement of the windows and door, recognize that the wall was constructed of bricks, and notice that the light from nearby yellowish artificial lights was diffused and broken up by shining through intervening fences and other stuff.

But, for me at least, one of the goals of night photography is to see what cannot be seen with our own eyes. The whole idea of a “realism” in night photography seems almost crazy to me, at least when shooting such dark subjects as this one. “Reality” is an incredibly dark and dim and barely visible wall. What is more interesting to me is what the camera can see in the near dark. Here it reveals the intense yellow/orange color of the artificial lighting and the uneven patterns of light and shadow.

(It also occurred to me as I worked on this photograph that while I generally am somewhat conservative with color and saturation and all the rest in my photography of natural landscapes… the wild, garish, and intense color and light of this night photography may represent an opposite pole for me.)

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Photographs: Night, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Urban/Street

Shacks and Ship Yard Structures

February 20, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

Shacks, trestles, pipes and other shipyard structures against a night sky – Mare Island Naval Ship Yard.

Several years ago I shot more or less this scene and created a black and white photograph from it, and since then I’ve been thinking of trying to work with the scene again. I’ve been back, but ended up not shooting it for a variety of reasons, including a tall fence that now blocks the view a bit. On another occasion I decided not to shoot it since there was no moon… and the original photograph was done in full moon light. (“It wouldn’t look like my other photograph.” What a silly reason to not shoot it!)

This time I wandered over to this area to shoot a different subject, the companion structure that sits just north of this one. (Both support large overhead “tracks” along which some sort of machinery was able to lift and move large things like ship engines from the shop to the waterfront.) With my tripod cranked up to a foot or so above my head, the camera could “see” over the fence, so I decided to go ahead and shoot this subject again.

Technically, there are a few challenges in the shot. The bright light is very close to the first building and it ends up being very bright and the light is a very saturated yellow color – so that limits the maximum exposure. At the same time, there are some deeply shadowed areas in the structure that you can probably spot – come of the areas under parts of the tower for example. In addition, the city of Vallejo lies beyond this facility – you can see a bit of the glow from its lights in the distance – and some of the city lights would be directly visible if I wasn’t careful with camera placement.

I’m intrigued by several things about this subject. As a decommissioned ship yard, it is interesting to think about what it must have been like here in the past when all of this was in use. (Mare Island’s history goes well back into the 1800’s when it was the first west coast naval ship yard.) I also marvel at the “stuff” that I see that I can’t understand at all. I have no idea what many of those pipes were for or even what must have gone on in these little buildings. And the weathered, rusted, decaying character of the structure itself is interesting to me.

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