Photographs: Chicago, Photographs: Urban/Street

Bridge Tender Tower

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Bridge Tender Tower
Bridge Tender Tower

Bridge Tender Tower. Chicago, Illinois. August 2, 2014. © Copyright 2014 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Chicago bridge tender “house” or tower, West Chicago Street Bridge.

I had notice one or two of these buildings previously, but had not thought too much about them. The most recent time I thought about them was in relationship to a photograph of another downtown Chicago subject that included the tops of a couple of these buildings, and I was trying to figure out what the call them in the photograph data. On that photograph, since the building wasn’t really a primary subject, I eventually probably just called it “building” or perhaps nothing at all.

However, this photograph features one of these structures as it predominant feature. On the river tour we saw a lot of them, and I eventually figured out the obvious — that they had something to do with the operation of the bridges. As I worked on this photograph I finally looked them up and discovered that they are called bridge tender towers or bridge tender houses. They apparently were the control points for the mechanisms of the bridges, Which can be raised to allow taller boats to pass through. I thought this one was especially remarkable and unusual. Many of the others seem to be made entirely of stone and often in what I would characterize as an art deco style. This one seems like some odd hybrid of medieval jail/tower and ships cabin, and the blue color is very striking, too.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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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.

Commentary, Ideas, Morning Musings, Not Photography

Social Media and the Death of the Web (Morning Musings 9/27/14)

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Dan Mitchell 1977 Website Screenshot
Dan Mitchell 1977 Website Screenshot *

How many of us have considered the ways in which popular social media services — which admittedly are hugely appealing in many ways  — are doing an effective job of killing the world wide web and undoing the early promise that it offered of direct and open access, along with visibility proportionate to quality, and critical disintermediation?

A few years back there was this astonishing, exciting, powerful, accessible thing called the world wide web, on which virtually anyone could share their story, their creative work, their business — and we saw the beginnings of the great disintermediation as boundaries were broken and the middlemen who had stood between content producers and consumers began to disappear. This was a world filled with promise. Those who produced valuable and interesting content (as differentiated from those who simply channeled it) could connect directly with a world of people who found that content compelling, and those looking for content could easily find it and follow it. Word got around, and it did so fairly directly, with little or no intermediation by those who had controlled traditional media.

Social media applications are seductive things, especially during their start-up phase, when the typical approach has involved giving away (or at least appearing to give away) a great deal of access by means of what seem like very open platforms. In fact, many who jumped onto these platforms early on did manage to leverage their initial power to their advantage. However, virtually without exception, these applications have morphed in directions that do not enable our own control over what we see and who we connect to, but which instead take control out of our hands and begin to determine for us what we will see, most often based on generating advertising revenue — a old model that takes us back to (to coin a term) nondisintermediation. Continue reading Social Media and the Death of the Web (Morning Musings 9/27/14) →

Photographs: Chicago, Photographs: Urban/Street

Blue Building, Bridge

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Blue Building, Bridge
Blue Building, Bridge

Blue Building, Bridge. Chicago, Illinois. August 2, 2014. © Copyright 2014 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Chicago bridge against the background of a modern blue building

When I began to go through my photographs from this August 2014 Chicago visit, I was surprised at home many of the downtown architecture photographs — at least those that didn’t focus on the older stone facade buildings — featured the color blue. It seems to be found everywhere. In many cases it is just a matter of the building actually being constructed of blue materials, but I think that Chicago’s relative openness to the sky may emphasize the effect even more.

One of the river bridges makes an abbreviate appearance near the bottom of the frame, with its bridge tending house poking up above the deck of the bridge. Beyond is a fairly typical — to me, at least — wall of modern Chicago buildings, towering above the streets and once again featuring that blue color.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email

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.

Morning Musings

Only As Good As Your Poorest Picture? (Morning Musings 9/26/14)

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Yellow Buildings, Shadows, Moving Clouds - Night photograph of two large yellow buildings, shadows, and streaks for clouds moving across the sky above the Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, California.
Yellow Buildings, Shadows, Moving Clouds – Night photograph of two large yellow buildings, shadows, and streaks for clouds moving across the sky above the Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, California.*

Recently I was part of a conversation about photography, focused on some technical questions about equipment, in which one participant sought to define the issue by writing that you are only has good as your poorest picture.

Simple and direct sayings like this one may have the virtue of quickly clarifying an important concept or truth and (something I could learn more about!) doing so in few words. Unfortunately, there are often downsides, too. Because they are so declamatory, it is easy for some people to simply accept them without thinking. Being simple, they often don’t fit all cases. And sometimes they are just plain wrong.

In this case, this notion seems to me to be dead wrong and to not fit at all what we actually know and observe about photography. In fact, I think that the opposite is actually true — photographers are actually as good as their best pictures.  Continue reading Only As Good As Your Poorest Picture? (Morning Musings 9/26/14) →

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