Black and white photograph of a man sitting on a bench and talking on his cell phone in front of the shaded wall of an urban building in San Francisco.
I was wandering through this part of San Francisco, mostly but not only looking for architecture like that of this building, especially with the combination of dark shadows and the fire escape contrasting with the white trim and the bright areas lit by the slanting sunlight. When I saw this fellow happily engaged in his cell phone call, completely oblivious to everything going on in the place where he sits I had to make a photograph.
Woman with coffee cup walks past a wall and behind a fire hydrant and tree, San Francisco, California.
While waiting for a table at a restaurant on a Saturday morning in San Francisco, I grabbed a few photographs of this interesting (to me, anyway!) juxtaposition of yellow wall, tree trunk, fire hydrant, and passing pedestrian from across the street. I first just thought that the light on the plain yellow/tan wall and the white window frames was interesting, and then I thought about how tree trunk and the cluster of leaves framed the central window. As I thought about this and started shooting the woman walked through the frame and, I think, added some balance to the elements in the scene.
This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
A man with a cell phone walks along a San Francisco sidewalk past maroon wall.
For the first time, I went out and did street photography with my two sons in San Francisco during the first weekend in March. It was fun, though I’m not used to shooting street (or much else) with other people, and I think my work habits may have a tendency to drive others slightly crazy. (Sons, thanks for putting up with me! :-) When I shoot street and urban subjects I tend to wander about rather slowly, looking at everything, getting distracted while I stop to shoot something, and then heading off in an unpredictable direction when something else catches my attention!
We took BART to the downtown area of the City and wandered up toward Union Square along with the rest of the horde, finally heading out into some less traveled streets where there weren’t quite so many people. We photographed various back streets and then descended through the fringes of the Tenderloin to end up at the Civic Center.
One irony is that while I am fully digital these days – though I did go with the traditional approach and shoot with only a 50mm prime – both of my sons prefer to shoot film now! There is no explaining some things! :-)
When I shoot street I tend to approach it somewhat as a landscape photographer, first looking for interesting light, patterns, colors, and so forth. At that point I often square up a composition and then look for the right person or people to walk through the scene, and I try to time the exposure to put the figure in an interesting place in the composition. In this case I think it got quite lucky with the colors of the fellow’s clothing against the maroon wall!
This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
Street scene from an overhead perspective of several people waiting for the train on a MUNI platform in San Francisco.
There is a good chance that this photograph isn’t going to make a lot of sense to some of my friends who enjoy my landscape work – but it is actually one of my personal favorite recent photographs. There are several things that I like about it. For one, I actually like the mostly muted color palette of grays and blues, but with the warmer yellow stripes on the platform and the two odd “international orange” pylon bases. I also like the combination of a strong symmetry with a bunch of elements that are anything but perfect and symmetrical: the positions of the five figures, the paving stones with squares of dirt, the slightly off-angle barricades. I can also look at this as an abstract image of shapes, most of which are related in some way to rectangles. And then there is the interesting (to me, at least) arrangement of the people into three groups: the two guys on the right who seem to be looking up towards my camera position, the couple who appear to be gazing at each other, and the girl on the left who is facing the other direction and seemingly oblivious to her surroundings as she talks on the phone. I also like the transparent curving wall beyond the four figures at the right and the position of the two trash cans (trash cans!) between them and the girl.
You certainly don’t have to share my enthusiasm for this photograph, but perhaps you’ll understand a bit of what I think I see in it.
This photograph is not in the public domain. It may not be used on websites, blogs, or in any other media without explicit advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
