Tag Archives: city

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

Toy Apple Beauty Barber Saloon

January 21, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The “Toy Apple Beauty Barber Saloon” in Manhattan’s Chinatown district

The photograph comes from Manhattan’s Chinatown district, which we visited on a warm summer evening a few years back. (Actually, we’ve visited the area many times.) We went there to try to eat a place we know, but decided to first wander a bit and, of course, for me this meant I could make some photographs. The area is different from other parts of Manhattan in a number of ways, but to me perhaps the most striking is the narrowness of the twisting streets, which are not laid out in the expected orderly form.

The streets are filled with small shops of all sorts. I think this is a beauty shop and/or barber shop, but the store name is a bit perplexing. Places like this intrigue me in the ways that they are not like modern chain businesses. Almost everything about the place is idiosyncratic — from the name to the cup on the object over the door leading to the lower room at the right.

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

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

Crew Members, Staten Island Ferry

November 16, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Two crew members against a railing in morning light on the Staten Island Ferry, New York, City

The photograph is something I grabbed while riding the Staten Island Ferry from Manhattan to the island. It is almost a bit embarrassing to admit this in retrospect, but I made the photograph while the whole family was on the ferry on the way to the wedding of our youngest son. They hired an actual wedding photographer — there were two of them, actually — but, of course, I could not leave my camera behind. I had been making a lot of informal photographs of the wedding party when I saw these two guys against the orange-painted steel of the ferry.

Technically the photograph was a little bit tricky. Not only were parts of the scene in deep shadow, but the two figures were backlit and the sunlight on the urban landscape beyond was extremely bright. I exposed to (barely!) keep a bit of detail in those bright areas, planning to bring the shadow details back in post. Amazingly, it worked! :-)

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

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

This Is Jess

September 18, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Door with graffiti and stickers

I truly don’t remember this photograph at all! Sometimes when doing street photograph (in this case at the start of five weeks or what was largely street photography) I photograph quickly and then almost forget quite a few of the photographs as I move on to the next thing, trusting that my ideas about the subject will come back when I see the photograph again as I do my post processing. In this case, no such luck!

I don’t usually photograph graffiti — in fact I used to make it my policy to almost never post graffiti or to disfigure tags that the photographs might contain. But in this case there may be enough in the scene to convince me to let it go. The layers of time and culture in this photograph are easy to overlook, but when you stop to think about it they are quite amazing. I’m sure that this wall and old door have stood for a long time, likely created by and for people who would have little concept of how the surroundings have evolved. The “stuff” on the door includes its own kinds of diversity, ranging from informal scrawls to bits of paper that were created with the intention of affixing them to place like this. And on the left we have the bright colors of the edge of a sign in (I presume) a Chinese language, itself visually contrasting with yet connecting to the newer writings on the green door.

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

Woman on Balcony

September 13, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A woman sits on the fire escape balcony of a brick apartment building

The first stop on our five-week “grand tour” was New York City — our oldest son and our daughter-in-law were getting married. This is the longest the two of us have ever been “on the road,” and before we were finished five weeks later we had been to New York City, London, Paris, Heidelberg, briefly in Munich and Bologna, then the Chianti region between Florence and Siena in Italy, and finally in Florence for a few days. Whew! One thing that came out of visiting all of these places, with between five or six days and up to eight days in each place, is that we got both a sense of the character of each place (though incomplete, of course) and we were able to see the contrasts between them. New York City certainly has its own character, somewhere on the spectrum closer to London than Florence perhaps.

The entire New York visit was not taken up by wedding events, so we did have a chance to get out and explore New York a bit, which we always enjoy. On this afternoon we ended up at the High Line Park, walking part of its length on a hot and humid day the eventually led to some light rain. (That seems to be a theme for us near the High Line.) Since I’ve been to this park before I have gotten to know some of the surroundings, and this particular brick wall of windows and fire escape stairways always attracts my attention. And this isn’t the first time I’ve found an interesting person on that very balcony — somewhere in my collections I’m pretty certain that I have another photograph of someone on this exact same balcony, sitting outside on a similar hot and humid day before the rain arrived.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: city

Toy Apple Beauty Barber Saloon

Crew Members, Staten Island Ferry

This Is Jess

Woman on Balcony

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