Tag Archives: building

Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: Italy, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Ponte Vecchio

October 17, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Buildings on the Ponte Vecchio bridge across the Arno River, Florence/Firenze

I have mentioned before that I often like to not know too much about a place before my first visit — I love the experience of discovering it in my own way once I arrive. While some research is a good thing, too much can compromise the experience. As a result, it isn’t unusual for me to arrive in a new location completely unaware of some thing that everyone else knows about. (Someone I know still tells the story of my first visit to Arches National Park…) This is a long way of saying that I did not really know about the famous Ponte Vecchio bridge until I saw it moments before I walked across the first time.

I now understand that this bridge across the Arno River in Florence has a very long history, but when I first saw it I simply responded to it on the basis of what I saw. And I had never seen a bridge quite like this before. The old span is almost entirely lined with buildings, many quite old, and apparently it was long ago the location of butcher shops and more recently of jewelers, art sellers, and souvenir shops. We arrived late in the day, just as the sunset light was coming on. I photographed this scene in the shaded side of the bridge, narrowing the composition to focus on the shapes, colors, and textures of the old buildings.

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

Photographs: France, Photographs: Urban/Street

Escalator, Windows

October 1, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Afternoon light from nearby windows on an escalator, the Louvre

We spent the better part of a day during our recent Paris visit at the Louvre. Anyone who has been there knows that a day is far from sufficient time to really see the place and the art that is housed there. We managed one full floor of one (of three) wings and a bit of one or two other areas. Clearly we have no choice but to return to Paris!

It is no secret that I, like lots of other photographs, am entranced by geometric shapes, effects of light, angles, and juxtapositions. Sometimes there is time to see these things and carefully consider how best to photograph them, but sometimes we don’t have the luxury. In this case, I had very little time, as the view is from a moving escalator! Fortunately, I had my camera in hand as we rode down to a lower level, so I was able to quickly raise the camera and make a few quick exposures of this view as it evolved and rolled past.

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

Woman on Balcony

September 13, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A woman sits on the fire escape balcony of a brick apartment building

The first stop on our five-week “grand tour” was New York City — our oldest son and our daughter-in-law were getting married. This is the longest the two of us have ever been “on the road,” and before we were finished five weeks later we had been to New York City, London, Paris, Heidelberg, briefly in Munich and Bologna, then the Chianti region between Florence and Siena in Italy, and finally in Florence for a few days. Whew! One thing that came out of visiting all of these places, with between five or six days and up to eight days in each place, is that we got both a sense of the character of each place (though incomplete, of course) and we were able to see the contrasts between them. New York City certainly has its own character, somewhere on the spectrum closer to London than Florence perhaps.

The entire New York visit was not taken up by wedding events, so we did have a chance to get out and explore New York a bit, which we always enjoy. On this afternoon we ended up at the High Line Park, walking part of its length on a hot and humid day the eventually led to some light rain. (That seems to be a theme for us near the High Line.) Since I’ve been to this park before I have gotten to know some of the surroundings, and this particular brick wall of windows and fire escape stairways always attracts my attention. And this isn’t the first time I’ve found an interesting person on that very balcony — somewhere in my collections I’m pretty certain that I have another photograph of someone on this exact same balcony, sitting outside on a similar hot and humid day before the rain arrived.

Photographs: Southern California

Sunset Watchers, Griffith Observatory

August 7, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Visitors to the Griffith Observatory watch the autumn sunset.

Before this trip to the Los Angeles area, where I’ve been many times over the years, I had never actually been to the iconic Griffith Observatory overlooking the LA basin. That should probably embarrass me at least a little bit as a near-native Californian — but, heck, I’ve been to Disneyland! ;-)

We were actually staying much further south, in the Mission Viejo area, but we decided to spend a day farther north in Los Angeles. We (well, OK, I) wanted to visit a particular photography museum, and we had a restaurant in mind for dinner. In the end, we found ourselves with a bit of extra time and someone picked the Observatory as a good place to spend it. I had not idea it was so popular, and when we got there we found huge crowds — perhaps because it was just about sunset, and there is hardly a better place to be at sunset than here. I made this photograph, shooting handheld in the evening light, and was fascinated by the dense crowd of people packed onto the terraces surrounding the building.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: building

Ponte Vecchio

Escalator, Windows

Woman on Balcony

Sunset Watchers, Griffith Observatory

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