Tag Archives: building

Photographs: Night, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Structures and Objects

Green Building and Tracks

December 13, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Ambient light floods the side of a building and old railroad tracks with green-tinted light, Mare Island Naval Ship Yard

A friend recently shared a photograph of a bit of curving railroad track, and I recognized it as being the same track that appears in this photograph from seven and a half years ago. I went back to look it up to share it with him, and in doing so I realized that I seem to have not shared it previously — so I’m rectifying that with this posting!

I have been photographing this location at night for over a decade now. I’m pretty certain that my first visit was back in 2003, when I happened to see an announcement of an event sponsored by The Nocturnes the San Francisco Bay Area night photography group. I had seen photographs made at night, of course, but it wasn’t anything that I had ever done, so I showed up. I was quickly hooked, especially when it comes to photographing urban and industrial areas in ambient light. This photograph is fine example of what attracts me about that light. If you were there in person, you would not really see anything quite like this — it was so dark that most of the details would be lost in shadow, the intense colors would be invisible to your eyes, and the only real details would be on the small lighted wall in the distance. But the camera can see what the eyes cannot. Here that includes not only the details in shadow areas, but also the wild colors that are produced by artificial lights.

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Photographs: Chicago, Photographs: Urban/Street

Reflections, Chicago

December 7, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Distorted reflections on Chicago downtown building windows

Once you start looking at the windows of modern urban towers, you begin to see them in a very different way. Instead of seeming like isolated structures or merely individual architectural forms, they start to relate to their surroundings and to take on changing and whimsical qualities. I first noticed this on my many trips up to San Francisco to photograph in the downtown area, where I became more and more aware of the reflections and the ways that light plays across the buildings and reflects down to the street level from their glass surfaces.

This was a handheld “grab” from the boat on the Chicago architecture cruise we took early one morning. In a way I wish that I had carried a longer lens so that I could have isolated the wild reflections on either the right or the left side, but since I couldn’t I instead decided to go ahead and split them with the section of reflected blue sky.

Photographs: Chicago, Photographs: Urban/Street

Red Car, Blue Building

October 25, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A red car waits in front of a blue Chicago building

This was a surprise grab shot near the end of a day of photographing, as we walked back to our Chicago hotel to get ready to go out for dinner. Most of the surroundings were not terribly conducive to photography at this point, being in the middle of a very neat and tidy hotel and business area, but here the organized forms seemed right for a photo, with the perfect vertical columns of blue shaded light and the single spot of red from the car parked in the driveway and, if you look closely, a single person in front of the car.

Photographs: Chicago, Photographs: Urban/Street

Building Reflections

October 12, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Distorted reflections in windows of Chicago downtown towers

As I have mentioned in earlier Chicago posts, I like the way that Chicago’s more open urban design provides more opportunities to clearly see the many tall buildings, allow more light to get deeper down into the space, and makes the interactions between the buildings more visible. As with many of the others, I made this photograph from the Chicago River while on the architectural boat tour of the downtown area. This tour offers views of many, many of the downtown towers and other subjects, though it can be a bit tricky to photograph them — they do move past quickly and it is pretty much necessary to shoot handheld.

If I recall correctly (without taking the time to review the sequence of my raw files), I made this photograph somewhere along the south branch of the river, where there was a momentary juxtaposition of the lower building with its visible exterior framing and the much larger glass-encased building with its curving surface on the left side. If you look closely at the photograph you will notice that very little of what you see is the actual structure of buildings, aside from that external skeleton in the lower building and the narrow frames of the windows on the higher one. Virtually everything else in the photograph of the builds is arguably not the buildings but instead is some sort of distorted reflection of its surroundings.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: building

Green Building and Tracks

Reflections, Chicago

Red Car, Blue Building

Building Reflections

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