Category Archives: Photographs: Urban/Street

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

Moonrise, San Francisco

Image November 21, 2019 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The autumn moon rises above San Francisco’s Transamerica building.

Late autumn and early winter are great times to do street photography, in my opinion. I suppose that I’m biased in that one of my objectives is to be able to photograph in the twilight and early evening hours, when a bit of remaining ambient natural light combines with artificial lighting to produce the feeling of night in photographs without looking all details to the darkness. (I also like the fact that I can photograph at night… and still catch a train back home from San Francisco at a reasonable hour!)

On this November visit I had arrived in The City in the early afternoon, doing the usual sorts of street photography in the more traditional daylight. As sunset approached I headed north through the Financial District, and eventually wandered up Columbus before reversing course and heading back to the south through the Chinatown District. (Main reasons I like to photograph there at night include abundant and colorful lighting, along with relatively narrow streets that let me get close to subjects.) As I began my walk south into this area I looked up and was surprised to see the rising moon sitting next to the Transamerica building.

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: Night, Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Travel, Photographs: Urban/Street

Chinatown Store At Night

Image November 15, 2019 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A woman walks past a San Francisco Chinatown District store at night.

My original idea was to render this as a color photograph, largely because the wild and bright colors in these stores attract me to the subject. But as I worked with the image in post it kept whispering, “I want to be monochrome…” In the end I decided to agree with that little voice. I like the noire quality of black and white in this case, and it also takes me back to my roots, when my early photography was all black and white… and done with film.

A photograph like this one poses several challenges, ranging from aesthetic to technical. The fill list of them is too long to treat fully in this post, but I’ll share a few. An aesthetic challenge comes from trying to include moving figures in such night photographs — both due to the difficulty in stopping their motion in low light, and because such figures don’t always appear in the. scene. My approach is often to find the “landscape” first and then wait for the “wildlife” (people) to arrive and populate the scene. It often requires both patience and multiple photographs to get it to work, and it doesn’t always succeed. The technical challenges are mostly about light. There are quite a few, but I’ll just mention some related to dynamic range and the locations of light sources. The brightest light in this scene is obviously coming from the bright interior of the store. But much of the scene is actually in near darkness, and the human subjects are mostly backlit. There is just a bit of ambient light coming from the lights on nearby businesses, but it isn’t nearly as strong as that coming from the shop. So I expose for that brightest source, with the intention of restoring shadow details in post. That isn’t always easy, but today’s cameras give us a ton of latitude for removing shadow detail.

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Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Urban/Street

Mr. Bing’s Cocktail Lounge

Image November 12, 2019 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

People walk past Mr. Bing’s Cocktail Lounge, San Francisco.

San Francisco is changing quickly. I’ve lived in the Bay Area long enough to remember when it had a very different and often somewhat more working class character, at least in the many neighborhoods where regular working folks lived. (There has always been a kind of wealthy upper class here, too.) Areas that are now considered quant tourist attractions used to be places where real San Franciscans lived.

So one thing I’m conscious of as I photograph in The City is that many features aren’t likely to stick around much longer. I’ve already seen many disappear. It wasn’t that many years ago that I walked south from into the Mission Bay district and found industrial sites, abandoned lots, old stuff that had been left to decay — but that area is now, a few short years later, filled with a new and wealthier group of San Francisco denizens. A year or two ago I started to see some changes along this section of Columbus — several venerable Italian coffee shops were closed or for sale. I know nothing about Mr. Bing or his cocktail lounge, but I have to wonder how long this establishment will be remain.

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Photographs: Night, Photographs: People, Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Travel, Photographs: Urban/Street

Souvenir Shop, Night

Image November 11, 2019 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

People in front of a colorful Chinatown souvenir shop at night, San Francisco.

A few years ago I began to photograph in San Francisco’s Chinatown district. At first the visits were simply connected to my street photography visits to The City, as this area happens to be on my route between several other areas I also photograph. As a Bay Area person I have visiting this spot for decades and, frankly, mostly regarded it as a tourist area. (In fact, portions of the “main drag” though the area do have largely that quality.) But eventually several things began to change my sense of the area. The first was deciding to not just walk the main tourist route, but to go a few blocks to either side. Second was to go there at the non-tourist times, for example in the early morning, when a walk along Stockton Street is a very different experience. Third was to photograph at night.

The first time I did the latter in this area was a few years back when some night photography friends suggested that we meet up for dinner there and then spend the evening photographing. I was entranced by the effect of the colorful lighting spilling onto the narrow streets and sidewalks, something that makes night photography a more viable option than on typical wide American urban streets. At about the same time I was introduced to Manhattan’s Chinatown district — a place that is both different from and similar to this San Francisco area — and I began to photograph both of them.

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