Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Urban/Street

Up The Stairs

Image July 15, 2023 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

This was one of those unexpected opportunities that make me operate on pure instinct, with almost no time to carefully think about what I’m doing. I saw the staircase in this fascinating light because we were at this concert hall in the daytime instead of at nighttime. I quickly whipped out the iPhone and framed a shot of the stairs. The masked woman — whose presence makes this a very different photograph than it might have been — was completely serendipitous.

We sometimes dismiss iPhone photography as not being serious. Well, some people do — but more and more folks recognize that it has its place. I wouldn’t normally carry a “real camera” to a symphony concert, but I do almost always have the phone. In this situation I was able to deploy it quickly, make a few adjustments, and capture a raw image that otherwise would have escaped.

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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” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him. Blog | Bluesky | Mastodon | Substack Notes | Flickr | Email

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Photographs: Nature

Three Foxglove Flowers

Image July 14, 2023 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Three white foxglove flowers hanging from a branch in shade.

Most of the time when I photograph foxglove flowers I tend to work with the vertical stalks of very colorful flowers, and I try to use a point of view that lets us look into the individual flowers. For one thing, there are often some fascinating patters inside the blossoms. But this time I decided to go in a different direction with this photograph of flowers hanging from a horizontal stalk.

The flowers were growing in a shady area and it was early evening, so I had very soft light to work with. By shooting across the hanging flowers I was able to put three of them in the frame but also include some background flowers behind them. And somehow the monophonic interpretation seems right in this case.

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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

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Photographs: Nature

Columbine Flower

Image July 13, 2023 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A columbine flower, photographed in soft light at a San Francisco Bay Area garden.

In another recent post featuring a Columbine flower (in that case a purple and white version) I mentioned my first awareness of this type of flower. It came decades ago on Sierra backpack trips when I saw a version of the flower up high in alpine country. The incongruity of a delicate white flower in such a place formed my ideas about it. That cemented my (not entirely correct) notion that thee columbine is an alpine flower and that it is always white.

The flower in this photograph is white, but I found it at a distinctly non-alpine location in the San Francisco Bay Area — a large public garden on the San Francisco Peninsula. We had gone there for a summer event featuring drinks and food al fresco in this setting of grasslands and woods, but we did bring our cameras and planned on spending some time photographing the spring flowers.

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Photographs: Nature

Foxglove Flowers

Image July 12, 2023 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A row of colorful foxglove flowers hang from a horizontal branch.

The garden where we found these flowers contains hundreds of blooming foxglove plants, or at least it did when we visited in early June. They are quite impressive plants, typically with tall and upright stalks supporting large, densely-packed masses of colorful flowers with their characteristic dotted pattern inside the blossoms.

A few were so full of flowers that they had leaned over, and as a result the flowers were hanging staring down below small green leaves and the main stem. I photographed this in soft evening light, not long before sunset.

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G Dan Mitchell Photography

Up The Stairs

Three Foxglove Flowers

Columbine Flower

Foxglove Flowers

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