Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

N.Y. Chung Chou City, LLC

August 29, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Bright lights of a Manhattan Chinatown shop on a summer evening

After dinner in New York’s Chinatown district, we went out to walk a very roundabout route to the subway. This was approaching my new favorite time for doing street photography — at night! With the newest cameras (I’m using a Fujifilm X-trans mirrorless for city shooting) the high ISO performance is good enough that I can crank it up, put on a f/1.4 lens, and shoot handheld in the urban night, working with only the ambient lighting. It wasn’t quite that dark here, but you can see that it was dark enough that the lighted interior of the shop was brighter than outside.

These scenes seem, to this west coaster, part of the culture and aura of New York City. There is a lot more going on here than might meet the eye, and I won’t even try to explain all of it. The ubiquitous plastic trash bags are an obvious feature. In my native part of the world, most neighborhoods appear to be places where trash doesn’t exist, but in New York everyone seems to just accept it as a part of the urban world. There is the odd matter of the cooler in front of the store entrance, which rests of a shelf and spews a stream of water onto the sidewalk. Between the light and the green awnings, the colors are fairly bright. And, at this early hour of the evening, a pool of light from the shop spills out onto the sidewalk.

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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Calero Oaks and Summer Grass

August 28, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Oak and grass-covered summer hills extending into late summer morning haze

This is a portrait orientation version of more of less the same scene I shared in an earlier photograph from the same mid-August morning hike through a familiar, long time favorite local hiking and photography location. It is an area full of grasslands and oak-covered hills, lush and green for a few months each winter and spring, and then California gold/brown for much of the rest of the year. I have hiked these hills and this specific trail for many years, though it had been several months since my last prior visit — it was good to be “home” again!

This morning was special for a few reasons. There was a wonderful feeling of returning to “my world” following a few months away from this place and my return, only days earlier, from a lengthy trip to the east coast that included more than a week in the very urban environment of New York City. It also turned out, a bit to my surprise, that this hike would bring my annual “autumn is just around the corner” experience — that day each year when something tells me clearly that summer is beginning to wind down and that the beauties of autumn are not far away.

Morning Musings

Foregoing Seeing in Order to Capture (Morning Musing 8/27/2014)

August 27, 2014 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Photographing Van Gogh — Capturing Van Gogh

This “morning musing” may sound just a little grumpy, but there you go.

On a recent trip through Chicago and New York City I had lots opportunities for people watching, an endlessly fascinating activity in big cities. Since many folks we say, especially in the most popular areas, were tourists (like us!) there were many people making photographs of their experience. That is a Good Thing — like most everyone, I treasure old photographs of such family activities, and I try to remember to make a few of them myself.

However, I also saw a frequent occurrence that makes me a bit sad for some of these travelers. Confronted with the opportunity for an experience, a surprising number pass up on that opportunity and instead settle for a record proving that — what? — they saw the thing or that they stood near it.

The gallery holding Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” painting, one of the most famous and familiar paintings today. (The gallery also contains a lot of other very wonderful work of the same calibre, for sure.) Before spending some time looking at the painting and trying to understand it, feel it, and fix in my mind many of its details, I spent some time watching the other people who were also there to view it. There were, not surprisingly, all sorts of responses — ranging from apparent boredom to rapt engagement with this work.

Among people with cameras of some sort, two ways of responding to the painting puzzled and continue to puzzle me.

The first is the apparent compulsion to make a smartphone image of the thing and then quickly move on. Actually, this goes a bit beyond puzzling me and almost leaves me stunned. On the practical level, if one really wants a photograph of the painting to review later it is trivially easy to find a really good one on the web or in a book, an image that will be far better than a handheld smartphone snap. On the affective level, it seems almost sad to see people with the opportunity to stand within feet of one of the world’s great works of visual art choose to raise a smartphone and press a virtual button rather than experiencing the actual thing.

The second is just plain bizarre. In these cases, less frequent than the first but still not uncommon, someone (mom or dad in many cases) sends other family members up next to the painting and has them pose, smiling awkwardly as the rest of us look away from the painting to watch them, for a snapshot that shows that they did, indeed, stand in the vicinity of a great painting and photograph themselves before moving on…

(To answer the inevitable and entirely appropriate question, Did I photograph the painting? — No.)

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

Little Italy, Evening

August 27, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Visitors pack closed streets though Manhattan’s Little Italy.

Walking more or less northwest from New York’s Chinatown district after dinner we ended up heading through Little Italy. As we walked on this Sunday evening we started seeing huge crowds of people and we soon figured out why. Apparently the streets through here are closed on Sunday evening, and restaurants tables spill out across the sidewalks, and people end up walking up and down the middle of the streets. The photograph is deceptive — it shows perhaps the smallest number of people that I saw here, and most of the time the streets were packed.

Originally we “planned” (to the extent that we were operating on any kind of plan!) to just walk through here, but it was so lively that we slowed down, stopping for sidewalk gelato, and I made some photographs. The colors were intensified by the diminishing late-day light, and I held my camera above my head and shot blind to get this elevated point of view. Ideally, I think this image works best as a large print, since there are so many small details to look at that aren’t easily visible in this small web version.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

N.Y. Chung Chou City, LLC

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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.