Since the photograph is minimalist I will make the commentary minimal as well. I made the photograph outside the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) at the end of a recent visit. This was a photograph of opportunity, made handheld as I left the museum and saw this simple conjunction of planes and varied light and textures.
Employees take a break outside and customers enter the Fishing Lab, Florence
If you have noticed an abundance of night photography in my posts this week, there is a reason. Today is the opening for the “Nocturnes & Noir” exhibit at the Harvey Milk Photo Center in San Francisco, a juried exhibit of night photography that includes a few of my photographs. If you are in The City, come and join us at the opening reception at 5:30-8:00PM at the Center, 50 Scott Street, in San Francisco.
I made this photograph in Florence, Italy on a lovely evening last summer, our final one in that city. We passed this restaurant while walking back to our hotel, which was very close to this spot, and the scene caught my attention on a number of levels. It is full of contrasts: between the patrons in the brightly lit doorway and the employees taking a break in the alley lit by streetlights, between the brown-pink tones of the front wall of the restaurant on the right and the green tones on the left. There’s more, but I’ll leave it to you to ponder! By the way, even though the restaurant intrigued me and even though we were staying right up the street, we never stopped to eat there. If I recall, someone suggested that it might have been a bit too familiar of an experience from Americans used to eating in big American cities, and we were more interested in trying to experience something more Italian. This morning I took a look at their website and read a bit more… and now it sounds kind of interesting!
Broom handle leaning against walls meeting in a corner.
Yup. A broom handle. Leaning in a corner between two walls with interesting texture, and lit by soft light. It is one of those little things I see sometimes and just have to photograph.
We were visiting an art fair in Laguna Beach on this Thanksgiving Holiday. Often I just wander in such places with no particular goal and certainly not with photography in mind. But I had a small camera with me, and there it was… ;-)
People assemble in summer twilight at the corner of Clay and Grant Streets, San Francisco
This was a beautiful San Francisco afternoon and evening. I rendezvoused with some photographer friends in the late afternoon, and after a group dinner we headed out onto the San Francisco streets eventually winding our way into the Chinatown area around dusk. Fog was coming in, turning the ambient light a beautiful blue color, and street and business lights were coming on and producing contrasting warmer toned light.
In these situations photography is a combination of keeping my eyes open and responding intuitively and of watching for potential compositions and subjects and then waiting for the right characters to populate the scene. Certain places are more likely prospects: narrow streets with electrical light coming from both sides, storefronts, and corners. At the latter people often have to stop and wait for traffic to clear or to figure out where to go next, and they sometimes assemble into interesting compositions and stay there for more than an instant. Here, if I recall correctly, my first attraction to the scene was towards the glowing light in this corner market. I quickly noticed the line of people spread across the scene from left to right, and for an instant the man standing in light at the center of the frame looked up and somewhat toward the camera, and against a backdrop of mostly hidden faces his appearance jumped out at me.
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
