Two trash containers in the doorway of a San Francisco building, with “Emergency Exit Only” signs.
So, yes, trash bins in the doorway of a San Francisco business — photographed on one of my street photography walks in The City. I’m tempted to just leave that there with no further explanation.
OK, a few hints. You could just look at it as two trash bins in a doorway — after all, that is what you see here. But if you enjoy such things, you could look at it in a variety of other ways, ranging from the mundane (code violations?) to more metaphorical. Your choice.
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.
To look at this photograph you would never guess that it was a very cold autumn morning that felt much more like winter than fall. We were camped in an eastern Sierra canyon, had gotten up very early to head out across the Mono Basin, as not far from this spot we encountered temperatures below 10 degrees at one point! Such is autumn in and around the Sierra — summer one moment and distinctly winter-like the next.
This view, photographed in early morning light, looks across the rounded, volcanic hills between the lake and Mono Craters toward the lake and Paoha Island, one of the two volcanic islands here. The distances encompassed by the photograph are quite huge, extending beyond the far shore of Mono Lake to the slopes to the north. That immensity is one of the main features that quantify the experience for me: immense space, deep quiet, and the huge sky.
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.
Late afternoon light on an Eastern Sierra Nevada autumn aspen grove,
Later in the Sierra Nevada aspen color transition many of the groves in this area had already lost their leaves — as you can see if you look towards the more distant trees. But the foreground trees were in that wonderful stage where there are still plenty of colorful leaves, yet enough of them have fallen to more clearly reveal the white aspen trunks. The late-afternoon side light, coming in low over the nearby Sierra crest, helped to make the leaves glow, too.
As I work my way toward the end of this year’s eastern Sierra fall color photography I’m thinking back on the nature of this season. Although the general contours of the color transition are often rather similar from year to year (aside from some of our recent extreme drought years) there are fascinating differences, too. Late in the summer this year I saw a lot of very healthy-looking aspen, probably as a result of two very good water years. That led me to expect that we the colors might be more spectacular than usual. In the end, there was plenty of wonderful color, and I managed to find it in some new-to-me locations… but the transition was unusual and overall not the most spectacular I have seen. It seemed to start a bit early and, to my surprise, in more places than usual I found trees that dropped leaves early. This grove is an example — in a more typical year most of the trees would likely have been in peak color when I made this photograph. No matter… one of the beauties of autumn aspen trees is that there are so many ways to photograph them, and if you don’t get vast groves of wild colors you may find another kind of beauty.
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.
A California winter landscape photograph reduced to its compositional fundamentals.
This photograph fits into a category I describe as “imaginary landscapes,” a type defined loosely by where it sits along the continuum between supposed representational reality and abstraction of landscape-derived materials. That might seem an overly-wordy way to describe it, but I’m always cognizant of the fact that no landscape photograph is truly objective or fully “real” — all photographs and certainly all landscape photographs necessarily are subjective. This could be due to something as basic (and obvious!) as the fact that the photographer chose to point the camera at some specific thing (and not at other things). It includes equipment choices( length of lens, aperture, etc.), basic interpretive choices (color or black and white, and how to handle either of those), and much, much more. In my “imaginary landscape” photographs I think I’m simply making this stuff more plainly obvious.
This one also illustrates, I think, something that figures into the landscape (but not just landscape!) photographs of virtually every photographer that I know of — the photograph is not just about the ostensible subject of the image. For most photographers other things also appeal — the shapes of things, their colors (a huge topic, by the way), how the components fit together, how things may be suggested rather than declared, and more. Allow me to make a musical analogy here. There’s a famous (or infamous) piece by composer/philosopher John Cage called 4’33”. In it a performer, takes the stage in the manner of any classical performer, then sits in front of a (usually) piano silently for 4′ 33″. One way to look at this is to recognize that Cage gave us every element of a musical performance but the one we think is central, thus forcing us to think about all of those “other details” and their central role in our perception of music. A photograph with no details (“the horror!”) may work in a somewhat similar (though not quite identical) way. Or maybe you just like the colors? ;-)
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.
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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