Tag Archives: buildings

Photographs: Italy, Photographs: Travel, Photographs: Urban/Street

Building And Shadow, Tuscany

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Building And Shadow, Tuscany
A cloud drifts in the sky above stone buildings in Tuscany

Building And Shadow, Tuscany. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A cloud drifts in the sky above stone buildings in Tuscany

If you follow my posts you may have noticed quite a few post from Italy recently, and you might be wondering why. Have you been to Italy? ;-) OK, there are more objective reasons I can share. I make a habit of reviewing older work a year or more after I make the photographs. I see the images differently with a bit more subjective distance from the actual experience. There’s another reason, too, and it ties the place I live (California) to Italy it ways that have only recently made more sense to me. This spring and summer as I’ve walked trails in California’s grass and oak lands on warm days, it has hit me just how similar the experiences can be. And a visit to an area winery on such a day reinforced that feeling. So I suppose I’ve been enjoying both the pleasant memories of the 2016 visit from which this photograph comes and the realization that I live in a place that shares some Italy’s pleasant features.

This is one of a pair of related photographs I made at an Italian vineyard and winery we visited — both focus on the stone buildings and midday shadows. (The related image will show up here in a later post.) The vineyard centers on a very old hamlet consisting of stone buildings surrounded by vineyard. We were there in the middle of the day, and the unique Italian light was wonderful. I’m not quite sure how to describe it in words, but it has some remarkable combination of the intensity of southern light along with the softness of the Italian atmosphere.

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 and Amazon.

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Photographs: France, Photographs: Travel, Photographs: Urban/Street

Paris Street, Midday Light

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Paris Street, Midday Light
Two figures in midday along a street in Le Marais, Paris

Paris Street, Midday Light. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Two figures in midday along a street in Le Marais, Paris.

Le Marais, in Paris, if full of visual delights. This area was “left behind” when much of central Paris was modernized, so you won’t find the wide boulevards and open views. Instead there are very narrow streets — often barely wide enough for a single vehicle, and that only because sidewalks are barely a foot or two wide. The buildings are old, often leaning at odd and interesting angles.

This photograph is a bit unusual in that I made it in full midday sun. I would most often not do a lot of photography at such a time of day, but I liked the stark quality of this light, and I thought that it could work as a black and white image.

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 and Amazon.

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Photographs: Night, Photographs: Structures and Objects

Two Buildings, Night

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Two Buildings, Night
“Two Buildings, Night” — Night photograph of two buildings in the historic core of Mare Island Naval Ship Yard

One of the attractions of photographing at night is the way that everything changes and familiar and even mundane subjects can be transformed. Night almost automatically adds an element of mystery to subjects, even when the literal subjects might arguably be mundane. This is partly the natural associations we make with the night, but it is also the objective nature of the light — rather than working under the sun or other forms of light from the sky, we rely almost always on multiple point sources of artificial illuminations. (And exception would be working under full moon light, but that has its own implications.)

I made this photograph in the “historic core” area of the Mare Island Naval Ship Yard in Vallejo, California. For the most part many of the original structures still stand in this area. (Much more extensive redevelopment has occurred elsewhere on the island, some of which has removed the old facilities.) Here some of the buildings have been updated and put to use for more modern purposes, but the general feeling of the place remains. I have photographed in this little alley-way for about fifteen years now. Somethings stay the same and other change, and on this visit I found that I was able to use the new corner windows on the foreground building as a point of focus.

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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” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him. Blog | Bluesky | Mastodon | Substack Notes | Flickr | Email

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Photographs: Netherlands, Photographs: Travel

Canal, Cloudy Sky

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Canal, Cloudy Sky
The sun shines through cloudy skies to light up an Amsterdam canal and nearby buildings

Canal, Cloudy Sky. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

The sun shines through cloudy skies to light up an Amsterdam canal and nearby buildings

I don’t think the sky was ever entirely clear during our four days in Amsterdam, but I was told by locals that this is pretty typical. In fact, based on what I was told, we were perhaps lucky to have as much blue sky as we did get! It rained the day we arrived, it was cloudy on most days, and that first day wasn’t the only rainy one.

I’ve observed that sunlight is often even more beautiful in places where it can’t be take for granted. I first understood this some years ago on a visit to Seattle, a place that is frequently also cloudy, wet, and gray. On the visit in question there was a period of beautiful, eighty-degree days of sunshine… and it seemed like every person in Seattle was suddenly outside. This day in Amsterdam wasn’t quite that extraordinary, but the filtered sunlight on the row of buildings along this canal seemed quite attractive.

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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 and Amazon.
Blog | About | Flickr | Facebook | Email

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