A portal near the convergence of two white walls, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
While walking on an upstairs floor in a central area of the New York Museum of Modern Art, I was in an area with stark white walls and portals to an inner “well” – the edges of the portals were treated in warmer tones of paint.
Since the image is minimalist, I’ll make my description minimalist as well.
Night photography of an old yellow building with dark windows against a backdrop of dark sky with star trails, Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, California.
This is probably a fairly conventional image of Mare Island buildings in some ways and it includes the ever popular star trails! One aspect of doing night photography – especially when exposures are measured in minutes rather than seconds, much less fractions of seconds, and double-especially when you must wait for a second dark-frame exposure to complete – is that you have a lot of time to stand around and observe and think about what you see. A whole lot of time. Before I made this photograph, I had made one of a nearby wall with some interesting windows and a door and illuminated by some light that passed through some intervening stuff, producing interesting shadows. The alley where I was shooting was quite dark, necessitating fairly long exposures, so as I made that previous photograph I had perhaps 10-15 minutes of “standing around time,” during which I was able to observe my surroundings pretty closely.
Lately one subject that I’ve been experimenting with is the upper stories of buildings, shot from below and with sky beyond. Near where I was shooting and next to a nearby alley was this large (apparently) concrete building with dark windows, and its pointed prow against a backdrop of relatively dark sky. I noticed that this section of sky held more bright stars that some other areas and that if I lined things up just right I could position some to either side of the point at the corner of the building.
Looking through a portal in a yellow wall towards a white wall beyond, lit by diffused light.
This is almost, but perhaps not quite, a “photograph of nothing.” As we walked through this New York City museum I was distracted by the way the light hit different surfaces, especially because the light was especially diffused on this cloudy morning – and I was intrigued by the juxtapositions of different colors and shapes and types of lighting that I could find as I moved through this space. This minimalist image consists of an open portal with what must be a safety cable along the bottom sill, with a large room with white walls beyond, and another similar portal and a corner breaking up the white walls near the left side of the image.
Ideally it would be best to shoot this from a tripod at low ISO and a long shutter speed and perhaps with a prime. However, here I had to improvise, shooting hand held at 1/20 second (yay for IS!) with a zoom lens that required some distortion correction in post.
The corner of a brick building at the intersection of Ferry and Nimitz Streets catches glow from nearby outdoor lights – Mare Island Naval Shipyard, Vallejo, California.
This is another photograph from my late-February night photography shoot a the historic Mare Island Naval Shipyard with The Nocturnes. The panoramic format image shows the corner of one of the brick buildings along Nimitz Avenue near the waterfront at Ferry Street. I’m almost always a sucker for old brick buildings, especially when photographed at night, but a few other things in this scene caught my attention. The right side of the building fronts that “main” roadway of Nimitz Avenue and is more brightly lit by street lights and security lights, while the left side is more in shadow and here is lit mostly by the light of the full moon. I was also intrigued by the contrast between the angular vertical and horizontal forms of the brick wall and the odd curving shape of the cable snaking up the side of the building in the center of the frame. I also noticed the glowing windows along the dark side of the building – the interior walls are picking up light coming in through the windows facing Nimitz Avenue. I also like the tiny bit of contrasting green color in the “Ferry St” sign.
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.
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