Shoreline fences along the edge of the San Francisco Bay with moored boats and, in the distance, the Oakland shoreline and East Bay hills.
This photograph was made from a spot that many San Francisco Giants fans know rather well – the Third Street Bridge that is right next to AT&T Park. There were few Giants fans around when I made this photograph though, since it was quite early in he morning on a weekday. The camera is pointing almost but not quite directly into the early morning sun, which shines through a luminous morning haze over the bay on a very still morning.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Hand painted sign and various pipes and valves on a concrete wall in San Francisco, California.
This is one of those odd little photographic vignettes you can find if you poke your nose into the right (or wrong) little alleys while wandering around in a city. I have passed this general area many times before, and had often notice fenced-off or gated small alleys extending along the sides of some of the buildings. I had even attempted to photograph through the fences, but without much success. However, for some reason – or else a fortunate coincidence – on this morning most or even all of the gates were open and I could wander down along the sides of these old buildings with their interesting and weathered textures and subjects.
This collection of “stuff” was next to a door that looked like it might have been used as a loading area, so I imagine that the old “BLOW HORN” sign, hand-painted directly on the concrete wall, must have once supplied instructions to those coming to make pick-ups or deliveries. I still wonder though about the fact that the sign was squeezed in behind this has of pipes, given that there were large areas of clear wall just a foot or two away from this assemblage of pipes and valves.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
An empty retail space after being vacated by a departing tenant.
Switching gears from the natural to the constructed, this is a photograph of a large and very vacant retail space in San Jose, California – shot on a late-December walk in a part of the city not far from where I live. This was once the location of a very busy and popular retail establishment that got caught by the current economic problems and some changes in technology that put their business model at risk. Only a very few hints of the nature of the original business remain at this point. The facility has now been vacant for several months, and despite new construction nearby it does not yet show any sign of new occupants coming in.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
The ruins of the Cook Bank in the ghost town of Rhyolite, Nevada, with barren desert hills under a pre-sunrise sky.
This was the closest to the winter solstice that I’ve visited Rhyolite, so I shouldn’t have been surprised by several things. First, the sun came up not only later, but also a bit further south along the horizon – and the light that would usually strike these ruins at sunrise was blocked for a while by a large hill that sits next to the town. Second, it was cold! Third, no one else was there at sunrise! This is a bit unusual since in the Death Valley high season (which arrives a bit later in the year), Rhyolite can be a pretty popular place… for a ghost town… in the middle of the desert… in Nevada. :-)
Because I have photographed here several times before and for the reasons mentioned above, I took a bit of a different approach to photographing the place this time. The winter light, some high clouds, and the different point along the horizon of the sun rise meant that the light was quite different from what I’ve occasionally had to work with in the past. At first I was a bit disappointed to realize that the direct dawn light was not going to strike the old Cook Bank and other nearby buildings. But when some clouds to the east obscured the direct light and high, thin overhead clouds begin to pick up color and fill in the shadows, I saw that other interesting lighting was going to make up for it. At the moment that I made this photograph, those clouds to the east (right) of my position beautifully softened what might otherwise have been some stark and harsh light on the pinnacles beyond the town. They also created an unusual and beautiful quality of light for a few moments – a reddish-pink quality from the light reflected from the clouds but with a few soft quality.
I decided to shoot from a distance with a long lens so as to control the position of the ruins against the background hills, and the longer focal length makes these hills more prominent than they would be if I shot the building with a shorter focal length from a closer position. This also allowed me to more carefully eliminate some distracting elements that invariably appear at old sites like this. (The first times I visited, access to most of the ruins was quite unimpeded. Now fences have been erected around some of them. Part of me regrets the loss of access, but the greater part of me understands that this will allow these buildings to be around longer so that more people will get to see them. I stayed behind the fences.) If you look around on the web a bit, you can find some wonderful old photographs of this town when it was a bustling place with thousands of residents, and when the Cook Bank was a very impressive and modern-for-the-time building.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
