Ding

January 23, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A pedestrian walks past a New York City post office building.

An apology might be appropriate for this photograph, which might be the oddest Christmas Day photograph of 2013. We had arrived in New York City the previous evening, and when we woke up on Christmas morning in Manhattan things were relatively quiet. We had an afternoon engagement in Brooklyn, but plenty of morning time to kill before that, so we figured that we might just take a (rather cold) walk deeper into Lower Manhattan, and we ended up heading toward the World Trade Center site.

Because there were so few people – and so few cars – out this morning, certain photographic opportunities arose that might not usually be easy or even possible here. You can bet that on a more typical day this street would have been filled with vehicles and the sidewalk filled with other pedestrians. But on this quiet day it was much easier to photograph unobstructed views or to find an individual figure in this urban landscape. As this man in black strode purposefully (very purposefully for Christmas day!) past this post office building I saw that I might have a brief opportunity to frame him against the architecture of the building and as soon as I saw this particular shot, a little voice in my head said… “Ding!” (Sorry. But probably not sorry enough.)

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Granite, Water, and Tree

January 22, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A small tree growing in a crack in a granite wall above the reflecting surface of a Sierra Nevada lake, Kings Canyon National Park

I have begun to return to the photographs from the September 2013 9-day backcountry trip into the eastern Sierra of Kings Canyon National Park. Four photographers traveled over two nearly-12,000′ passes to reach a basin full of lakes at 11,000′, where we set up camp and photographed for the better part of a week. By staying in one location we were able to come to know the surrounding wilderness intimately, frequently returning to locations at different times of day and in different weather conditions. Of course, even a week in one valley like this one is not sufficient to truly know it – a lifetime might be necessary for that!

When I return from a shoot like this one I’m always anxious to dig into my photographs and see what I came back with. In the field, while I’m complete focused on each photograph as I make it, I quickly move on to the next thing, and after a week of shooting I certain do not recall every shot. The initial pass through the image files always reveals some photographs that speak to me, and others that seem to have potential. I might work them over for a week or two, but then I tend to put them aside and move on to other things. But I’m not done. Some photographs do not reveal themselves to me as quickly as others, and I’ve learned that when I go back to the original files months or even years later I often “discover” photographs that were there all along, but which somehow escaped my attention. This is one of those, though in this case I think I have some ideas about how it ended up waiting for me to revisit it months later. First, when I made the photograph I knew there was something about these patterns that was photographable – but at the time I recall being a bit challenged by making a composition out of it that did not include some distracting materials above the elements you see here. At the same time, another photograph of a similar subject turned out to be one of those that worked right away, and I think that encouraged me to move on past this one. This week I began to revisit these files and when I saw this one it was almost immediately obvious to me that it would work with his wider crop, which solved the problem of the “distracting materials” that I mentioned above. I like several things about this photograph: its subtle color palette, the strong abstract patterns of cracked rock and green-gray lichen, the very small tree growing in the crack in the rocks.

Photographs: Abstract, Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Textures, Photographs: Urban/Street

Paint on Metal Wall

January 21, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Colorful patches of spray paint on a metal wall, Brooklyn, New York

While wandering around in the DUMBO area of Brooklyn, between a walk in one direction on the Brooklyn Bridge and a walk back in the other direction on the Manhattan Bridge, we walked up some streets under the flyover at the Brooklyn end of the Manhattan Bridge. This is not what you might think of as a “special” area, being beneath a bridge and containing at least some of the expected forms of urban decay. Surprisingly though there were some interesting things to see here – nice light on this day and some urban/street subjects.

As we walked up one narrow street we passed, as I recall it, some storage yards and similar that were fenced off from the roadway and sidewalks. I think this was part of a section of metal fencing along the sidewalk. I remember looking at this very bizarre pattern of colorful paint and wondering how it got there. There were no signs on the wall at this point, but it looked like someone must have spray-painted some objects in front of the wall, and done so more than once and with a wild variety of colors – blue, hot pink, fluorescent green, several shades of hello, orange, black, and more. This accidental art seems to be the result of the creation of something else that was nowhere to be found.

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Southern California

Dune Forms, Evening

January 20, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Shadows from evening light slanting across curved dune forms, Death Valley National Park

Having photographed here many times, I know these and other dunes of Death Valley fairly well – well enough at this point to have some ideas about where and when to photograph them and to be less interested in the more familiar views. I had spent the majority of the day, starting well before sunrise, exploring and photographing an entirely different area of the park, but as I did so I had formed a general plan to head to the dunes at the end of the day and photograph them in evening light. I had a bit of time after finishing with the first subject, so I headed back to camp to hang out a bit.

I may have hung out just a bit too long! My plans for the dunes were not exactly fixed, though I knew that I wanted to investigate a less visited area of lower dunes away from the main area and that I wanted to be out there shortly before sunset – to shoot the sunset light and then to continue shooting right on past sunset and into the beautiful and subtle dusk light. By the time I got to the dunes, I figured out that the winter sun sets a bit earlier than I had realized, and I had to hurry out to my shooting area. Although I did not have a specific idea of what I would shoot, I had some general ideas involving slanting light, shadows, curving shapes, texture of sand, and possibly some vegetation. But once on the scene I had to work extremely quickly, as the long shadows of the low angle sun moved quickly across the sand, and a new composite of light and shadow would appear only to move and then disappear in a matter of seconds or perhaps a minute or two. Within moments of making this photograph, the last warm sun on the dunes was gone, and I was left with the cold post-sunset light.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Ding

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Paint on Metal Wall

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Dune Forms, Evening

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

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