Tag Archives: america

Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Structures and Objects

Museum Atrium

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Museum Atrium
Museum Atrium

Museum Atrium. New York City. August 11, 2014. © Copyright 2014 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Light patterns on the atrium wall at the New York Museum of Modern Art

I think I end up visiting the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) every time I visit New York City. It may be partly out of habit, but it is also because there are always things there to see. MOMA always features photography — though the work on display this time was not quite my cup of tea. There are special exhibits, and we were especially surprised and please by the Lygia Clark show. It is always hard to resist — we inevitably fail — visiting the regular collection of famous work in the main galleries.

For me, the space itself is an interesting photographic subject. To some extent it is a good place to photograph people, and I did a bit of that in one particular gallery displaying work that did not particularly impress me — though I noticed one particular museum attendant keeping a very close eye on me. She never said a word, but it seemed like she was always watching me, to the extent that she shows up in perhaps half of the photos I made in that exhibit! The building itself is fascinating, in terms of its own architectural details, how people inhabit the space, and how light plays on its shapes and surfaces. This photograph features the central atrium, which I have photographed in the past, crisscrossed by light patterns stretching down from the roof.

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.

Photographs: Nevada

Basin and Range, Monsoon Clouds

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Basin and Range, Monsoon Clouds
Basin and Range, Monsoon Clouds

Basin and Range, Monsoon Clouds. Between Winnemucca and Elko, Nevada. July 30, 2014. © Copyright 2014 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Evening monsoon thunderstorms dissipate above the basin and range terrain of Nevada

This simple photograph necessarily leads to a long story. It starts many, many years ago when I was a child. My family moved to California from Minnesota when I was four years old, and every few years we took a long trip back to the Midwest to visit my mother’s family in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. (Although I have not been there for some years now, I still have fond feelings for the place.) Sometimes we drove, with my parents figuring out routes that would take us through national parks and monuments — Yellowstone, Rocky Mountain, etc — along the way. Several times we took the train, which in those days was the famous California Zephyr. We would get on the train in Fremont, California and travel all the way to Omaha, Nebraska, arriving very early in the morning and then getting to South Dakota by (usually) rental car or (occasionally) a plane. To a young kid, the California Zephyr was an amazing thing — somehow we got “Pullman” sleeper cars, ate in the dining car, and — if my memory is correct — passed hours in the vista dome car watching the terrain roll by.

Jump forward to the new millennium. Patty’s brother and sister-in-law, and two of our sons and their girlfriends live in Brooklyn, so we find excuses to go to New York City every year or so. This time we went not only to visit family, but also so that Patty could attend the International Double Reed Society conference at NYU. We’ve flown plenty of times, so this time we decided to give the train a try. (We did fly back home at the end of the trip — a good choice in my view.) So on this last day of July we went up to Emeryville, where the Zephyr’s trip starts these days, and embarked on our adventure, nostalgic for me and brand new for Patty. There is much more to say about train travel than I have space for here, but I’ll share just a bit about the first day. The route begins along the shores of the San Francisco Bay and then up the delta to Sacramento, the historic end point of the continental railroad. From there the train crosses the Sierra above Truckee Lake, an absolutely beautiful route that often reveals perspectives on this part of the Sierra that are quite different from what we know from driving Interstate 80. As we crossed the crest, the clouds thickened and we rolled through a hail storm as we descended to Truckee. Not long after that we stopped briefly in Reno, Nevada, and then continued on to the northeast across Nevada. After we passed through Winnemucca (from which I departed some years ago on a grand bike trip across the Black Rock Desert and into Northern California) the train continued on through the Humboldt Basin as evening came on and beautiful light fell on the rangeland and the monsoon clouds overhead as the day came to an end.

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.

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

Chinatown Street

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Chinatown Street
Chinatown Street

Chinatown Street. New York City. August 10, 2014. © Copyright 2014 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A narrow, empty street curves past small shops in New York City’s Chinatown

First off, I’m obviously not a “real” New Yorker — I love the place, but I’m most certainly a visitor and a west coast guy at heart. However, that means that for me many things that might seem familiar and perhaps even ordinary to long time New Yorkers are still special and new. My first visit to New York’s Chinatown area was only a few years ago. We came into the city on Christmas Eve and pretty much the only restaurants open nearby (we were staying on Canal Street) were in Chinatown, so we plunged into the throngs that typically seem to crowd the sidewalks here, eventually wandered down some narrow streets, and arrived at a restaurant where we met up with friends and family members for a wonderful dinner.

This time we got there a bit later during our trip, on an evening when we were all perhaps becoming just a bit travel-tired and when we wanted a dinner that wasn’t quite so expensive as some others we had recently enjoyed. One or both of our sons suggested that we meet up at a place in Chinatown again, and since we arrived a bit early I took advantage of the situation and made a few photographs on this wonderful little street, with its beautiful curve, small shops, and wildly colorful store fronts and signs. Most of the time this street was busy with passing pedestrians, but I waited a bit and managed to make this photograph of the empty street in the evening light. The details of such photographs are often fun and intriguing — the picture on the hair salon sign at the left, the bicycle sitting on its rear wheel at the far right, the colorful flags on one store front, and more.

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.

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

Manhattan Traffic

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Manhattan Traffic
Manhattan Traffic

Manhattan Traffic. New York, New York. August 5, 2014. © Copyright 2014 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Motion blur abstract of Manhattan traffic

OK, here we go! I’m about to share a string of urban photographs, many of which are from New York City, where I spent slightly more than a week in early August. We were there for several reasons. My wife was attending a music conference at NYU. (A conference of oboe and bassoon players, if you wondered.) Her brother and sister-in-law live in Brooklyn and graciously agreed to host us during our stay, and our two sons also live in Brooklyn. For me this meant that I had the better part of a week to simply head out into Manhattan and Brooklyn, going wherever my intuition took me, and make photographs of the city.

A lot of the photographs fit into the street photography genre — which may seem a bit perplexing to those who know my landscape and nature photography — but this first one is more of an abstraction, created my means of a slow shutter speed and camera motion, most likely as I was crossing some busy street in midtown Manhattan.

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.