Tag Archives: black and white

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

Winter Light and Cross Walks

February 17, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Winter backlight illuminates pedestrians and cross walks in Manhattan

People in cross walks seems to be becoming a bit of a theme here. I think that a reason may be that people tend to stay more or less in one place a bit longer while waiting to cross and their paths are more constrained while crossing the street. On top of that, encountering the temporary end of the sidewalk at a street corner does tend to face people into groups, and once the light changes they retain some connection to the group for a moment.

A few other factors appealed to me in this scene, and it wasn’t just the people. The light was wonderful, low winter light coming up the street from Lower Manhattan, and impossible to keep its sources out of the camera’s field of view in this shot. That produced the soft glare of light in front of the buildings on the right and it backlit the figures and case long shadows. Those shadows cross perpendicular to the light-colored lines of the cross walk, with become wider as they get closer to my camera position.

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

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

Tasty Hand-Pulled Noodles

February 16, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Man in vest and helmet emerges from Tasty Hand-Pulled Noodles, Inc.

This is another quite street photography photograph made in Manhattan, almost certainly along the edges of its Chinatown district. On the scale from instant and intuitive to slow and methodical, this photograph fits in the former category. I think I recall stopping for no longer than a few seconds to photograph this place, and timing a couple of the exposures to include this fellow coming out through the door. Once he was out of the picture my interest waned and we moved on.

Of course the name of the business caught my attention — not just “Noodles” or that word plus someone’s name, but “Tasty, hand-pulled noodles, Inc.”, and on a shop that wasn’t, well, very pretentious. The fellow coming out the door was wearing one of those bright orange reflective vests and a bicycle helmet. I saw no bicycle nearby, but perhaps he was a messenger. Not clear from the photograph, unless you notice how much clothing he is wearing, is that he was apparently out on a bicycle on a day when the temperature barely reached twenty degrees and the wind was blowing strongly.

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

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Ocean & Coast

Land And Sea

February 15, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Big Sur coast meets the Pacific Ocean

I live close enough to the Big Sur coastline that I can visit on day trips, and I can visit at times when it is relatively quiet and uncrowded. A winter weekday can be ideal, and right now it is even less busy since the route is still blocked by a giant landscape perhaps fifty miles or so below the Monterey Peninsula.

Most often I prefer to photograph fairly early in the morning, when the light skims down across the coastal hills, creating patterns of shadow and light, or else in the evening, when the warm light of the late-day sun colors the ocean and the hills. But on some almost perfectly clear winter days, perhaps with a few high clouds and some atmospheric haze, the air almost glows and I can photograph right through the middle of the day. This was such a day. The haze and mist, partly atmospheric and party from spray thrown up by surf, accentuated the bluffs and headlands as they dropped into the Pacific, and the brilliant sun made the water so bright that it was difficult to look at it.

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

Crossing Lexington

February 13, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A man crosses Lexington on a winter afternoon in New York City

I made this photograph on one of the coldest in a string of very cold winter days in New York City between Christmas and New Year’s Day. On such days we still were out walking around Manhattan quite a bit, but we also sought out shelter and warmer activities. On this day the plan was to visit an exhibit at the Guggenheim. We took the subway up there and arrived late enough that we had to join a line waiting, we presumed, for folks in the already-crowded building to leave so that we could enter. After fifteen or twenty minutes in the line, standing in freezing wind, we realized that the line was not moving at all, and we bailed out for a nearby restaurant where we could warm up.

After lunch we ended up on Lexington, where there was plenty to see and photograph. Many of my photographs on this afternoon took advantage of winter sunlight obliquely slanting across buildings and windows and reflecting onto the sidewalk and street. However, the light for this photograph was different — a sort of soft glow filtering down from the strip of sky above the street. This is a busy place, but during a momentary break in the pedestrian and vehicle traffic this solitary man slowly crossed the street in front of me.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: black and white

Winter Light and Cross Walks

Tasty Hand-Pulled Noodles

Land And Sea

Crossing Lexington

Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.