Tag Archives: authority

Look. No Train Horn

Look. No Train Horn
Sign near a light rail crossing in an old industrial area.

Look. No Train Horn. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Sign near a light rail crossing in an old industrial area.

These signs are along one of the routes I take on my (nearly) daily urban walks. Sometimes the walks stick to tree-lined residential streets, but some of the routes take me into older areas that are a bit rougher around the edges, many of which feature old businesses and shops. There are still rail lines through some of these areas, though they are rarely used — and some have been closed off or even converted to non-rail uses. Here the local light rail transit system follows the route of the old tracks and crosses near an intersection where I found these signs.

Until a few months ago I frequently encountered the light rail trains at crossings like this one. But this is a Valley Transit Authority (VTA) route, and that is the entity that was the victim of a mass shooting earlier this year that tragically took the lives of a number of employees who work on the light rail system. The system remains shut down and there is so far no word on when it will reopen.


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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

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Staten Island Ferry

Staten Island Ferry
Staten Island Ferry

Staten Island Ferry. New York, New York. August 19, 2011. © Copyright 2011 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Details of the Staten Island Ferry in black and white.

This photograph may need a bit of explanation. Though it might be fun for you to try to parse out what you are seeing first. Go ahead. I’ll wait…

We did the cheap thing on this afternoon after walking around parts of south Manhattan – we wandered over to the Battery Park, saw a ferry approaching, figured we had just enough time for a scenic round trip, ran to the terminal, and did the free over-and-back on the Staten Island Ferry. The price is certainly right, and the ferry provides interesting views of the Brooklyn shoreline and the south end of Manhattan.

This is a photograph of… not much. The only in-focus element is the vertical metal bar near the left side of the frame. There are windows in the frame as well, and they provide several layers of reflections along with some other “stuff” from the glass itself. (The fence-like object at lower right is actually behind my camera position.) I shot this with a very large aperture to get a narrow depth of field, so everything beyond the metal column is out of focus – the sliding windows, the portion of a person at the right edge of the frame, the water and horizon, and the barely visible bit of the Verrazano bridge in the right window.

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