Tag Archives: california

Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Indian Restaurant

February 24, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Late afternoon winter light on the exterior of a neighborhood Indian restaurant.

This restaurant is located not far from where I live – close enough that I could photograph it on a walk from my home. (Though these walks can sometimes carry me out to about a four mile radius or so…) This is not one of those fancy, up-scale Indian restaurants, but rather a local, neighborhood place whose location and outer appearance might not encourage you to go inside and try the delicious food. Yes, I’ve eaten there.

At first I was just thinking about the angles and surfaces of the building, but also about this interesting late-afternoon winter light that slants in almost parallel to the ground in the vertical dimension, and almost flat across the front wall of the restaurant. As I moved in to try to find a composition I noticed the empty vase for the first time, and as I line things up to keep the very bright light on a hidden wall out of the frame, I saw the bright and somewhat orange light reflected from that wall onto the more distant area to the left where a door is open (even though the restaurant is closed) and a blue milk carton crate has been abandoned.

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Southern California

Salt Flat Patterns

February 22, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Detail of a section of Death Valley salt flats as seen from Dantes View

Death Valley is often not quite what it seems to be. Repeat visits and views from different perspectives – far away, very close up, from above – begin to reveal things that you might not see at first. From next to and on the salt flats in the lowest section of the Valley, you see a very desolate terrain – one of the most non-human terrains I know. Here, well below sea level, there are places that seem completely inhospitable and alien, landscapes of caked salt, worked and sharp-edged salt and dried mud, seeps of shallow water, occasional odd plants, and landscape that often seems to go on almost endlessly the same way. But just as looking more closely reveals surprises (such as living creatures in those millimeters-deep pools of salty water), the view from overhead shows patterns that cannot be readily seen up close.

This photograph was made from the summit of Dantes View. This high point along the eastern side of the valley is close to a mile above the Valley floor. The view can often be panoramic, stretching for tremendous distances in almost all directions, blocked only by the higher peaks of the Panamint Range to the west and a few other high points nearby. Although Dantes View is one of the best known “iconic” locations in the park, I have a complicated relationship with the place. First of all, I seem to attract awful weather when I go there, perhaps because I tend to do so in the season that is winter elsewhere in the state. Not too long ago I attempted to drive to the summit on a winter day and was turned back by a snow storm perhaps a half mile from the end of the road. In addition, it has been hard for me to warm up to the place as a photographic subject. In some ways, there is almost just too much in the view for me to see how to isolate a photograph out of that detailed immensity. I dealt with that here by using a very long lens and restricting my view to a small section of the valley floor, without much context of surrounding terrain, which I think produces a photograph that allows the features in this frame to be seen as abstractions.

Photographs: Abstract, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Urban Wall, Tree Shadow in Winter Light

February 19, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The shadow of a tree casts its shadow in winter light across an urban wall.

I made this photograph in the very late afternoon near the end of December, 2012. For some reason, each year at about this time I get the idea of doing a personal “photo walk” that starts at my front door and then wanders around the “neighborhood” in a two-mile or so radius. Almost invariably, the walk takes place late in the day and lasts through the sunset hours. I frequently cover (or perhaps I should write “cover again”) familiar territory, and I even re-photograph some of the same subjects that I have photographed in the past. (This isn’t the first time that I have photographed this wall.) I usually walk slowly for the most part, focusing more on looking than on walking. By slowing down and especially by paying attention to things I might photograph, I invariably see things – within walking distance of my home – that I would otherwise not see at all.

This photograph probably looks like a very strange amorphous thing to some viewers, so let me at least explain what you see. This is a concrete wall, with low angle sun striking it almost directly from the left, producing stretched shadows from a nearby tree. The wall is painted green, but the very warm golden hour light moves the color toward yellow. The wall apparently is an attractive target for vandals/graffiti artists, since it is apparent that something was previously painted out using a slightly different color paint. Although it is hard to see in this small web jpg, I like this odd mix of colors and the interesting details of the wall’s texture as they are revealing by the side-light.

Photographs: Coastal Redwoods, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Forest Ridge, Fog

February 18, 2013 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Ocean fog overruns forest-covered ridges in Marin County, California

I made this photograph on a very cold, cloudy, gray, and by most people’s standards, fairly miserable day! It was a morning of murky atmosphere, high clouds blocking the light, and thick ocean fog along the coast and into the coastal forests – and it had stymied most of my attempts to find the sorts of photographs I was looking for. I finally decided to just look around – we call this “scouting” – and I eventually ended up in the hills near Mount Tamalpais State Park in Marin County, where I thought I might get above this gray atmosphere. I sort of succeeded, rising above the coastal fog, but the overall haziness and the high clouds were still a factor.

As I drove up the ridge and past an area of open meadows, the view opened back down towards lower hills with fog swirling round them. The hills were mostly submerged in the fog, but in one area the tops of ridges managed to poke through, though at times they, too, were covered. This is one of a small set of photographs I made here before moving on. In order to get the mood that I wanted to evoke from this subject, I made several particular choices in post production. One was to desaturate the colors quite a bit but to not go all the way to a purely black and white rendition, so the dark areas retain the slightly blue-green coloration of the forest. I also did some work with curves to produce the balance of light and dark that I was looking for.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: california

Indian Restaurant

Salt Flat Patterns

Urban Wall, Tree Shadow in Winter Light

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