Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: People, Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Urban/Street

Looking In

August 5, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Almost everyone in a group of people looks into a conservatory courtyard while waiting for it to open.

Apologies for this title, but I did not get the name of the building (perhaps today I’ll do that), “A group of people looking into a courtyard with one guy looking the other way” seemed a bit too long, and I ran out of creativity before posting. I suppose there is the potential here for incorporating some quip about San Francisco “summer” weather as well – on this lovely “summer” afternoon there were high clouds and fog and it was trying to rain! :-)

I had another afternoon to kill wandering around San Francisco yesterday afternoon. My general target was something like street photography, though it also incorporated this little project I have to photograph downtown buildings from odd angles and render the images in black and white. I had been working on the latter and was heading back to where I would have dinner (and running a few minutes late) when I saw this little cluster of people crowded around what looked like the entrance to this glassed in courtyard filled with palm trees and some tables. Any sort of odd little scene like this – quite different from the general rush of people in the downtown area – catches my eye and often seems like it might make a photograph. Here I had the group of people crowded together to work with, along with the classical architecture of the building and courtyard. So I did what I often might do with such a scene: I stopped and quickly made one initial photograph so as not to miss it entirely, and then I remained and watched for something interesting or out-of-place to occur. When the fellow at the right separated himself from the larger group, my first reaction was a bit of frustration that he had broken up the group of people facing away, but in the end he makes the photograph more interesting to me than it would have been otherwise.

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: Pacific Northwest

Day Lilies, Wockner Hospice Garden

August 4, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Day lilies growing in the Commemorative Garden at the Gene and Irene Wockner Hospice Center, Kirkland, Washington.

Thanks to the several people who have told me that these are almost certainly daylilies. (I originally used two words, “day lilies,” to title this and I’m going to leave the title that way for now.) I’ve also been told that the name reflects the short blooming period of the individual flowers, which might remain in full color for only a “day.” While I did not know the name of the flowers, I certainly could tell that the blooms did not last long. In fact, in this photograph, the buds of incipient flowers are visible above and to the right of the main flower, and one that has already run its course is near the top of the bright red and yellow flower.

Commentary, Ideas

Put Down That Camera!

August 3, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 3 Comments

An article that I saw this evening at the SFGate website (“Arm’s length: Does filming hold reality at bay?“) got me thinking again about the strange ways that the ubiquitous camera has affected our relationship to the world around us. From the article:

We can film anything today, from anywhere, by simply extending our arm and aiming a device at the subject of interest. Then, almost as quickly, we can beam those images to the world. But is this progress? Are we starting to experience things through miniature screens rather than actually living them by being there? We are taking pictures, but we are distancing ourselves even further from the things we are taking pictures of?

The article opens by describing a group of people waiting for the passage of the peloton in the Olympic bicycle road race who, as soon as the cyclists appeared, raised cameras and rather than experiencing the actual event of the race, looked at in on the LCD panels of the cameras held in front of them, hoping, I presume, to get around to actually seeing race later on their computer screens.

I saw a similar scene unfold – actually I saw a lot of them unfold – recently on a summer afternoon in San Francisco. I had wandered over to the Palace of Fine Arts to, yes, make some photographs of the architecture, the surrounding grounds, and perhaps the people who were there on this sunny day. The Palace is an imposing, classical edifice left over from a worlds fair many decades ago, and it features giant fluted columns and a central structure with a very large and very tall dome. I could write an entire post about the sorts of things that people were doing there related to photography, but I’ll just mention one. When I photograph such a place I actually spend a lot more time just walking around and looking than I do making photographs. I might walk and look for ten or fifteen minutes, spot something, make a few photographs, and then go back to looking. As I walked along the pathway around the lake that sits in front of the Palace, I noticed people feeding the geese and other birds that congregate there. A large group of “kids” (perhaps high school age?) who appeared to be on a group visit from another country came by just as a small group of geese swam past. They rushed to the edge of the water to, I thought, get a closer look, sit on the low wall next to the water, and watch the birds. I was wrong. Every single one of them pulled out his/her cell phone or point and shoot camera and pointed it at the birds and made what could only have been the world’s most banal photographs of birds in water. I don’t recall a single one of them watching and experiencing the actual birds rather than recording the event for, well, for what exactly? “We went to San Francisco. There were some birds in the water.”

I often see a related form of photographic dysfunction when I’m making nature or landscape photographs. I might have found a beautiful spot, looked at it and studied in long enough to find a composition, and set up my camera to wait for the light or clouds or for the wind to stop. Or I might not yet have found a shot, instead just looking and walking around the scene, taking in its visual nature, thinking about color and light and wind and texture and form, waiting to see a photograph. If I am anywhere near a road, almost invariably one or more cars will pull up, windows will be rolled down, cameras poked through windows, windows rolled up, and away goes the car. Sometimes they don’t even slow down to make the photograph, driving by at the speed limit with cameras pointed out the window!

I cannot deny that there is some value in using a camera to simply record proof that you were there, and I’ll admit that I enjoy seeing old family photographs of people in these places. But the reflexive action of photographing everything at the cost of experiencing nothing seems sad and a bit perverse to me. If this thing being photographed is so special that it is worth traveling great distances to see it, isn’t it also worth slowing down long enough to experience it and take it in through all of your senses? Isn’t it better to experience five things deeply than to skim the forgettable surface of 100 things without pausing?

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Pacific Northwest

Flowers, Wockner Hospice Center Gardens

August 3, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 3 Comments

Flowers photographed in the Commemorative Garden at the Gene and Irene Wockner Hospice Center, Kirkland, Washington.

During the past week and a half I spent a great deal of time in view of the beautiful and quiet garden in which these flowers were found. I think they are lilies, but I’m not the world’s greatest flower identifier (to say the least!), and I would welcome an accurate identification from anyone who knows. After looking at the garden from indoors for a week, I finally decided to take a slow and quite walk through it one afternoon, and I made a few photographs as a sort of meditation.

The reason I was at this place was not, of course, a happy one. My mother, Elinor Danforth Mitchell, entered the hospice a week and a half ago after suffering a serious stroke at the age of 93, a stroke that was the sort she was undoubtedly thinking about when she gave us advance instructions (which was so like her!) about what to do should this happen. She not only lived to 93 (like her sister “Dolly,” and her mother Nora), but she was amazingly resilient as she faced a series of challenges during the past few decades, beginning with the loss of her husband, Richard S. Mitchell, over 20 years ago and continuing with health challenges including arthritis and macular degeneration that left her nearly blind. (A bright spot though – in the past month or two, a procedure she had earlier this year had actually given her back some of her sight, much to the amazement of all of us and much to her pleasure.) Through it all, she remained as positive as she had always been. About her blindness, she had said that getting angry or depressed wouldn’t help, so she was just going to accept it and move forward – and she did. So in her eighties she figured out how to be almost completely self-sufficient in her apartment, and people who met her often did not even realize at first that she had lost her sight. Perhaps most important to her, she kept her mental acuity right up until her stroke. She could – and frequently would! – recite the birthdays of four children, four children-in-law, eleven grand children and more. As my sister wrote recently, she could probably tell you, to the penny, what she paid for the Thanksgiving turkey in 1976!

All four of her children were scheduled to visit to help her with a move from her apartment to new living arrangements, and two were to arrive on the day of her stroke. This meant that all four of us were able to be with her during the week and a half until she passed away quietly on August 2, 2012.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Looking In

Day Lilies, Wockner Hospice Garden

Put Down That Camera!

Flowers, Wockner Hospice Center Gardens

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