The front of an old home in Neckarsteinach, Heidelberg, Germany area
I’ll keep the commentary brief on this one. We traveled by boat a short distance up the Neckar River from the Altstadt Heidelberg area last summer and stopped here to wander a bit and to eat. Our wandering took us up and down some narrow, twisty, hill streets and past some beautifully weathered homes.
I truly don’t remember this photograph at all! Sometimes when doing street photograph (in this case at the start of five weeks or what was largely street photography) I photograph quickly and then almost forget quite a few of the photographs as I move on to the next thing, trusting that my ideas about the subject will come back when I see the photograph again as I do my post processing. In this case, no such luck!
I don’t usually photograph graffiti — in fact I used to make it my policy to almost never post graffiti or to disfigure tags that the photographs might contain. But in this case there may be enough in the scene to convince me to let it go. The layers of time and culture in this photograph are easy to overlook, but when you stop to think about it they are quite amazing. I’m sure that this wall and old door have stood for a long time, likely created by and for people who would have little concept of how the surroundings have evolved. The “stuff” on the door includes its own kinds of diversity, ranging from informal scrawls to bits of paper that were created with the intention of affixing them to place like this. And on the left we have the bright colors of the edge of a sign in (I presume) a Chinese language, itself visually contrasting with yet connecting to the newer writings on the green door.
A blue-clad person walks along a Florence sidewalk
Late in August, we ended our lengthy travels — the last four weeks of which were in the UK and Europe — in Florence, Italy. We had met family in the Chianti region, where we all stayed together for a week, and since we would begin our homeward flight in Florence, we decided to at least spend a couple extra nights there before departing. I suppose the main thing I discovered during our brief Florence visit was that two nights (two half days and one full day) was not nearly enough time to explore this city!
Our first Italian city was Bologna, where I noticed the color palette of the buildings was different from what I’m used to — almost everything was some shade between a dark tan and brown, all earth tones. We soon figured out that this was typical in all of the areas of Italy we visited. You see those colors in this photograph, with slight variations plus a bit of blue-gray around one door frame. Coming from the high-tech world of the San Francisco Bay Area, I was also struck by the natural wear on buildings in Italy — many had cracks, areas “needing” paint, and might seem to lean a bit. I discovered that this isn’t really a sign of decay, just the nature of the many older structures that give the place its character. This photograph shows, for me at least, one other characteristic I found in Italy, namely the remarkable light. Here it is the stark midday light, but it is often softened by a kind of gentle atmospheric haze or by low clouds. I think I now understand much better the nature of the skies I’ve seen in paintings from this part of the world.
Midday light along the narrow road through Castello di Ama, Italy
While visiting a vineyard/winery here I learned some things I would not have expected about this part of Italy. I’m used to California’s wine country, especially the areas in northern California where a lot of the vineyards seem to be either on hillsides of quite often in flat river valleys. Here, at least among the vineyards around the area where I made this photograph, the vineyards are on relatively steep hillsides and, as I discovered, on soil that is more rock than dirt. There was a place where the path was well below the level of the soil surface and a section of the rock wall had been removed to show the earth down perhaps 6-8 feet deep… and it was almost entirely rock.
Speaking of these paths, I made this photograph along an old, narrow, winding “road” between the buildings of a now-isolated village. It was midday, when the light becomes much brighter and sharper, though still with that bit of softness that seems to be the norm here. The high sun angle and bright light cast a strong shadow across the wall at the left and part of the part, while a few scattered clouds floated by overhead.
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.
