Tag Archives: city

Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: San Francisco

Richardson Bay and Tiburon, San Francisco Bay Morning Haze

February 21, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The San Francisco Bay and the haze covered East Bay beyond the waters of Richardson Bay.

When I headed over the Golden Gate on this early February winter morning I intended to end up photographing redwoods or along the coast north of San Francisco in the morning before heading south to go back home by midday. I ended up getting distracted by very interesting shooting conditions in the Marin Headlands of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and by the time I finished there I didn’t have enough remaining time to carry through on my original plans. But I did have a little time left, so I headed up to this spot along a ridge above Marin City where I know of a great view out over Richardson Bay, the Tiburon Peninsula, Angel Island, the Bay, past fog-shrouded Oakland, and on to the East Bay Hills.

This is a long lens landscape shot, for several reasons. First, the somewhat longer lens – though 159mm isn’t all that long – compresses distance a bit, both bringing Oakland’s downtown buildings a bit “closer” and foreshortening the very large distances a bit. It also lets me “edit” out some potentially distracting elements close to my shooting position and limit the scope of the image to just those elements that I wanted to include.

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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: Architecture, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Urban/Street

Urban Residential Buildings, Sidewalk and Street

January 2, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 3 Comments

Facades of residential buildings along a hilly street in downtown San Francisco.

With all of the landscape and nature photography I’ve posted recently, I figured it was time for something different. This is a street scene in San Francisco I photographed on a quick walk on an early March day in 2010. Many of the other photographs I made in this area included people, but it this one I wanted to isolate the fronts of the buildings, especially the contrast between the relatively fixed-up one on the left and the more weathered one on the right.

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.

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Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Red Tile and Door

December 27, 2010 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A stripe of bright red tiles and dilapidated doors in San Franciso’s Mission District.

This photograph was made early in 2010, and is one that I dredged up from the “archives” during the year-end process of reviewing all of my thousands of 2010 raw files. I had been in San Francisco with some spare time and I found myself in the Mission. This area is a great resource for photography, so I set out on foot to look for subjects along the crowded streets of this neighborhood. A small girl behind the heavy screen door on the left (barely visible in this photograph) first caught my attention, but I also found the juxtaposition of horizontal and vertical lines interesting along with the very weathered and distressed doors and walls. The thin line of brilliant red tiles was striking against the dark and dingy background.

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Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Structures and Objects

San Francisco Skyline, Light Beams

December 21, 2010 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Beams of light from brilliantly lit clouds send beams of light past downtown San Francisco buildings and toward the waterfront.

Anyone who knows San Francisco might be wondering about this light – and I wouldn’t blame them. These were really unusual conditions. Believe it or not, the photograph was made very early in the morning, perhaps a bit less than a half hour after sunrise. Which begs a couple of questions: why is the light coming from the right (west to southwest) at dawn? And, why does the light seem to be coming from such a high angle?

The light beams are not direct sunlight. The sun is actually far to the left of the frame and very low in the sky. Its direct light was blocked by intervening fog clouds. As the clouds moved from left to right, thinner areas in the cloud cover were struck from behind by the very low angle sunlight coming from the left and set aglow. It was the brilliant light from these areas of backlit clouds that cast the light through the mist and between buildings. What you cannot see in the still photograph is that as the clouds moved the beams of light slowly swept from right to left. From moment to moment the light beams would angle from right to left, then straight down, and then left to right.

Another amazing thing was that I appeared to be the only person out making photographs of this…

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.

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