Urban Canyons, Evening. San Francisco, California. July 9, 2012. @ Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

An urban landscape photographed in evening light, downtown San Francisco.

I spent a couple of days in downtown San Francisco earlier this month, with opportunities to photograph early and late in the day. Late in the afternoon I headed out and down Market street, starting out in less that amazing light but anticipating that things would certainly become more interesting as the evening wore on. On this particular walk I mostly headed to places that I already knew from many previous visits. I have often looked at this building and thought that it held to potential for a photograph that wasn’t just a “shot of the building,” but so far I had not actually come up with on. As I walked along the east side of the structure I saw that the very bright early evening sun was streaming across and between other tall buildings to the west and then past and through the columns in the left side of the frame. I positioned myself so that one of the columns just blocked the direct sun to make this photograph.

While I am perhaps mainly oriented to landscapes, both small and large, in my photography, I really enjoy shooting urban subjects as well. In some ways the experiences are very different – obviously the hustle and bustle of a major metropolitan downtown area feels a lot different from the quiet and solitude of the mountains, desert, or shoreline. But I respond to many of the same things in both places – juxtapositions of shapes, textures, and most important, the light. In the latter context, this photograph is not all that different from, say, one that features light flowing over the peaks of a Sierra ridge and down a canyon to pass between the trunks of trees. It is, after all, the same light.

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.
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