Tag Archives: district

Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: Pacific Northwest, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Textures, Photographs: Urban/Street

Brick Wall, Pearl District

June 3, 2013 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

A brick wall with green windows and a small garden in the Pearl District of Portland, Oregon

This is another photograph from my recent trip to Portland, Oregon. As car-free (and almost carefree) visitors to the city, we did a lot of walking, wandering more than once a day up and down between portions of the Pearl District and the downtown area where we were staying. Since I was carrying a very small and light camera on this trip (my Fujifilm X-E1) I was able to do a lot of “casual” photography of various things we saw on these walks.

There is quite a variety of buildings in and around the Pearl District, including many brick buildings. (To this California near-native, that seems like a disaster waiting to happen, but I digress…) They range from rather old structures to newer architecture seemingly intended to capture that old Portland semi-industrial/working class look. The subject of this photograph is simply the back wall of a large apartment building that we walked past on a partly cloudy and intermittently showery afternoon.

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: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Sandstone Tower, Fruita District

February 21, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A sandstone tower stands above the Fruita District orchards in early evening light, Capitol Reef National Park

These sandstone plateaus and mesas seem characteristic of this front-country area of Capitol Reef National Park, and they are perhaps the most striking visual icon of your approach to the park from the town of Torrey, Utah, to the west. The Fruita District is the most accessible area of the park, being right alongside the main east-west highway that passes through the park. It features some picturesque sites and sights that are enough to make almost anyone pull over and look, including the old orchards that apparently gave the area its name and the accessible petroglyphs on low cliffs that run along the road. (Although this portion of the park is quite accessible once you are out here and driving across Utah, most of the park is anything but easily accessible, and getting to other places within its boundaries can involve some very long drives on some fairly bad roads, plus some hiking. I’m fine with that! ;-)

I made this photograph late in the day, after we had done a bit of exploring along the main tourist route into the park, the largely paved road towards Capitol Gorge and other nearby points. Late in the day I happened to spot this little conjunction of creek and fall-color tree and green grass and red rock cliffs as we were about to leave the park.

Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Sandstone Towers and Cliffs

January 19, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Sandstone towers and cliffs in evening light, Capitol Reef National Park

By comparison to some of the other well-known Utah national parks, it seems to me that Capitol Reef is perhaps a bit more difficult to get to know. Oddly, this might be partially because it is so easy to experience it very superficially. A main highway passes right though the park, and a number of the characteristic and iconic features are visible from the highway or by barely leaving it: the well-known orchards, accessible examples of rock art, large and impressive sandstone walls and towers, the Fremont River. Other features are neatly containing along an impressive “scenic drive” with some popular trails. But it seems that the steps to see additional aspects of the park are bigger than at some other parks. For example, while most Yosemite visitors think of The Valley as the park, it isn’t really all that difficult to drive paved roads to Glacier Point, redwood groves, or even the summit of the Sierra. But to go a bit further at Capitol Reef you might have to drive through a river, have four-wheel drive, ask someone about some relatively unknown canyon, drive for many miles on gravel roads.

My first visit to this park was limited to the most accessible features, as we were passing through on our way to another place. We stopped briefly to see the rock art, and I saw those iconic orchards of Fruita. On the second visit, we had more time – we were in the area of several days – and we spent time on the “scenic drive,” did a few of the hikes, and poked around the fringes of these area. We even drove the dozens of miles down that east side gravel road and took a long drive on less-used roads to return to where we started. On a subsequent trip, we asked around a bit, and ended up poking into a canyon where we were the only visitors and walking along a route high in the mountains on a sub-freezing morning. This photograph comes from the intermediate experience of that second trip. Although there was (and still is!) much that I don’t know about this huge and diverse park, by this point I was starting to get a sense of the rhythms of light and so forth, and this enable us to be at this (accessible) location at the right hour as the day came to an end.

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

Man in the Window

August 12, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Reflections in the windows of a financial district building, San Francisco, California.

I’m fascinated by the reflections in and among the windows of urban buildings, especially those whose surfaces are primarily glass. It often seems when I look at them that the building barely has a real surface at all, and instead most of what I see when I look is the often distorted reflections of other surrounding buildings and signs and perhaps some sky or clouds. So when I walk in San Francisco with my camera I’m often looking up, not so much to simply photograph the buildings but also to watch for these transitory conjunctions of reflections

I made this photograph while walking a narrow street in San Francisco’s financial district late in the day as fog was softening the early evening light. I was momentarily almost shocked to see the face of this man who, divorced from the full context of the sign on which he appeared, looking like huge and intense figure in the windows of this building. And aside from the two horizontal ledges and the thin structures between the window panes, everything else in the image is also a reflection of the surfaces of buildings around and behind me.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: district

Brick Wall, Pearl District

Sandstone Towers and Cliffs

Man in the Window

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