Photographs: Austria, Photographs: Urban/Street

Narrow Street, Cyclist

September 28, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A bicyclist disappears around a corner on narrow cobbled streets of Salzburg, Austria

During our July 2013 three-week travels to London and parts of Germany and Austria, we ended up in Salzburg on several occasions – despite the fact that we weren’t actually staying there. We spent a week near Berchtesgaden in Bavaria, staying with a bunch of family members at a rambling old farmhouse. We spent most of the time there in Bavaria, but on a couple of occasions we ended up in nearby Salzburg, plus out train arrived at and departed from the Salzburg station.

The old part of Salzburg combines, as many places we visited also did, some beautiful old history and lots of very wonderful old places with a whole lot of touristy stuff! I wonder how Mozart might react to discover that fast food places are now a short distance from the place in which he was born! Several times we walked away from the main, popular area and walked through some narrow and twisty streets leading away from the tourist sites. As we walked down this narrow and curving street, a cyclist suddenly passed by, and I had just enough time to lift the camera and shoot as he leaned around the corner at the end of the street.

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Portrait(s) of the Photographer as a Young Man

September 27, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

We (actually mostly my wife) recently began the process of scanning thousands of old photographs that we inherited or which have been sitting in closets. They range from snapshots from relatives on both sides of the family to serious photographs we made back in the BD (“before digital”) era – many slides, a good number of prints, and some negatives. There are tons of treasures buried in all of piles of images, and rediscovering them is a pleasure.

G Dan Mitchell with Camera

Today she came across two photographs of me from a long ago time. I think I must have been about 16 years old. I probably felt pretty grown up at the time but, man, do I look young! I’m almost certain that my father, Richard S Mitchell, made these photographs, and they appear to have been shot somewhere in our yard – the flowers look like my mother’s garden.

My father was a talented and enthusiastic amateur photographer who owned a succession of interesting and, for the era, modern cameras. As we earned his trust, he loaned some of them to us. (In retrospect, I wonder if he was doing so partly so that he would simply have to upgrade his own cameras so that the kids would have cameras. I now understand that mode of thinking quite well. ;-) He also had an enlarger and could set up a sort of impromptu darkroom in the bathroom, where he gave me my first lessons on black and white printing.

G Dan Mitchell with Camera

I’m pretty certain that the occasion of these photographs was my acquisition of the first “good camera” that I purchased with my own hard-earned funds, by saving up my allowance, yard-mowing money, and funds earned by sharing a paper route with a neighborhood kid. I believe that it was a Minolta SRT-101, a nice basic film SLR that I purchased with a good little 50mm lens and to which I eventually added the little clip-on external light meter. Perhaps I’m reading into the two photographs, but I see two different aspects of my response to the new camera. In the first photo, it almost looks like I’m attempting to strike what I probably thought was the appropriate pose for the young photographic artiste that I undoubtedly imagined myself to be. In the second, I think I’ve let down my guard, and I seem to be gazing at my new camera with some combination of pleasure and surprise that I actually own the thing! :-)

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Solitary Tree, Glacial Erratic Boulders

September 27, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A solitary tree grows on granite slabs, surrounded by glacial erratic boulders

I made this photograph at a well-known and increasingly iconic location along the Tioga Pass Road as it passes along the Sierra high country terrain as it ascends toward Tioga Pass. This spot could probably serve as a prime lesson about how many other opportunities and ways to see there are for Sierra photographers, even when shooting with certain big, famous iconic features only a few degrees of tripod swivel away! (It is OK to photograph the icons, too – we all do it. But it is more rewarding I think, to also look beyond such things to see the much larger and equally beautiful world around them.)

The basics of looking beyond icons involve, well, looking around. A first step might be to go ahead and photograph the icon a few times, get to know it, and perhaps eventually shoot it when there is something a bit different about it – unusual weather conditions, a different time of day, out of season, etc. But the next step is to look in other directions, poke around a bit, and think about just what else contributes to the subjective experience of being in that place. I come to this spot frequently just before sunrise, and at that time the beautiful glacial erratic boulders strewn about the terrain are highlighted by the slanting, warm light and some of the more distant features are beautifully obscured by shadow and atmospheric haze.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Evening Shadows, Alpine Lake

September 26, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Evening shadows fall across an island-studded alpine lake and surrounding cliffs as the sun drops behind a nearby ridge

This lake is one of many located close to the spot where four of us spent six mid-September nights camping near 11,000′ of elevation near the spine of the Sierra in Kings Canyon National Park. We remained in one base camp location, and each day we explored more of the surrounding terrain of lakes, granite, meadows, vast bowls, ridges, and surrounding peaks. While the backpacker’s imperative is often to keep moving in order to see a lot of country, ours was to stay in one area and spend time getting to know it better. Our subjects were literally outside the doors of our tents, and we were up before dawn every morning and we didn’t return from shooting until dark.

I photographed this lake and its surroundings on multiple occasions, ranging from early morning on sunny days to dusk on a day when I shot in light rain. The appearance and mood of such a place is transformed significantly according to the light at various times of day and in response to the weather. One constant in this particular location was that large areas were often in shadow in the very early and very late hours, as steep slopes and high ridges stood between the landscape and the sun in many places. The light in this photograph is illustrative. Perhaps only minutes earlier, the final direct sun of the day had come across a high ridge to the right of my camera position and washed warm light across the water, the rocky islands and shore line, and the broken granite cliffs. But here, all that remains of the light is an intense beam of light angling down from right to left beyond the main cliff and casting only a bit of direct light on its edge. Below, light in the bowl holding the lake has turned cold and blue – a change that literally took only moments. While I think we tend to first think of that earlier, warmer light, this cold shaded light is an intrinsic element of these high places and the feeling of that light is what I wanted to capture in this photograph.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Narrow Street, Cyclist

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Portrait(s) of the Photographer as a Young Man

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Solitary Tree, Glacial Erratic Boulders

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Evening Shadows, Alpine Lake

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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.