Tag Archives: abstract

Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Urban/Street

Virtual Surfaces

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Virtual Surfaces
Distorted reflections in the windows of a San Francisco building.

Virtual Surfaces. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Distorted reflections in the windows of a San Francisco building.

Almost every time I photograph in big city (and sometimes small city…) downtowns I end up getting distracted by the things reflected in the windows of tall buildings, and by how they relate to the forms of these architectural structures.

Buildings of certain styles and vintages have exteriors that are largely glass. While these buildings have physical forms and volumes, what we see of them is more a result of what is around them than of their own shapes. I’m intrigued by how little of what we see when we look at such structures is actually the structures themselves — most of what we see is virtual, imaginary, and transitory. In this photograph, all you see of the buildings actual exterior are a few non-reflective areas between windows — some dark horizontal strips and a few lighter vertical panels. Everything else in the image is either inside the building (a few interior lights seen through the windows) or a distorted reflection of the building’s surroundings.

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.

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Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Urban/Street

Building and Reflections

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Buiolding and Reflections
One Front Street in black and white, San Francisco.

Building and Reflections. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

One Front Street in black and white, San Francisco.

At this point it is probably no secret that I like photographing urban subjects — not just nature — and that the urban landscape is near the top of my list. I’m fascinated by city subjects, from the bustle of people-filled scenes to the almost abstract possibilities found in modern buildings.

This is an often-photographed San Francisco building that towers above pedestrians in the central downtown area. The parallel curved structures extending skyward capture and reflect light in all sorts of interesting ways. Here the reflections of surrounding structures merge with the forms of the building itself.

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.

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

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All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature

Sand Waves

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Sand Waves
Rising waves of sand in soft light, Death Valley National Park

Sand Waves. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Rising waves of sand in soft light, Death Valley National Park.

This photograph comes from a memorable visit to a remote location in Death Valley National Park about eight years ago. I was in the park during the first few days of January. I saw far fewer other visitors than I usually encounter there these days, and I experienced some very cold temperatures! A few days earlier the thermometer in my vehicle registered at freezing as I drove below sea level very early one morning. On the morning after I made this photograph I finally got around to checking the temperature at around 9:00AM after the sun had come up, only to discover that it was still in the low twenties!

When I arrived at this location in the late afternoon there was only one other small group of visitors. (They were gone when I came back from photographing, and I had the place completely to myself that night.) I figured out where I would camp that night, and then I grabbed my photography gear and headed out into the nearby landscape of sand with distant vistas of playa and mountains. It was late enough the I soon found myself photographing the dunes in soft, post-sunset light.

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.

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

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All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Abstract, Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Imaginary Landscapes, Photographs: Nature

Winter Landscape

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Winter Landscape
A California winter landscape photograph reduced to its compositional fundamentals.

Winter Landscape . © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

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.

Blog | About | Flickr | Facebook | Email

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

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.