Tag Archives: downtown

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

Glass Facade

July 29, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The reflecting glass surfaces of a downtown San Francisco Tower.

This is another photograph exploring the unreal nature of large urban buildings, especially those almost entirely covered in glass. As in a few of the other recent photographs of this subject, I chose to move very close to the base of the building and shoot almost straight up, lining things up so that the upper edge of the building is barely within the boundary of the frame. The building is an otherwise not-all-that-unusual one along lower Market Street in San Francisco. (I’m terrible about identifying the buildings – I really need to start taking some notes or at least photographing addresses!)

There are three things that caught my attention about this building and this composition. First, the glass wall at the right, which is perpendicular to the main facade of the building, produces a reflection that creates a false impression that the building is symmetrical. But what you “see” of the “right side” of the building is actually the left side in reflection – the actual extent of the building to the right cannot be seen from here. Second, reflected light from windows in another building casts patterns of lighter areas on the vertical, fluted columns that extend straight to the top of the building – and this is also reflected in that perpendicular wall on the right. Finally, while the surface of the building is essentially the reflected image of the sky, the differing reflectivity of alternative vertical rows of windows creates a subtle banding in the lightness of the sky reflection.

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

Urban Canyons, Evening

July 25, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

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.

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

Reflective Building

July 23, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

I photographed the exterior of this building while walking in the financial district of San Francisco in the early evening. I was mainly shooting street subjects with a 50mm prime, but fortunately I had a telephoto zoom in my bag that I could use to isolate this section of the building from its surrounding context. In addition, I decided to take some liberties with the image in post, including some serious perspective adjustments that brought the vertical lines into nearly parallel alignment.

When walking around in an urban environment like this one, it is easy to focus on the grit and “reality” and noise and all the rest. But if you look past that you can find some astonishing images in this environment, some of which are quite abstract and perhaps border on hallucinations. This is a building – that is fairly obvious. But what in this photograph is actually the building? Not much. The thin, darker vertical lines are the frames around the window glass, as are the even thinner diagonal lines running upward from left to right. If you look closely you can see a few bits and pieces of what is inside the building, mostly in the form of interior lighting. But the main portion of the image is not really the building at all, instead consisting of warped and distorted forms that are the reflections of its surroundings, reflected in its glass surface.

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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” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him. Blog | Bluesky | Mastodon | Substack Notes | Flickr | Email

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

One Front Street, San Francisco

July 18, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Imaginary (urban) landscape based on the facade of the One Front Street building, San Francisco.

This is another in a short series of photographs I did earlier this month in which I focused on shooting very close to the base of some downtown San Francisco buildings, aiming the camera nearly straight up in order to see their shapes more abstractly, and then working fairly freely in post to modify the images in ways that I felt were interesting. This one, and some of the others, are subject to enough post-processing that they probably fit into the category that I describes as “imaginary landscapes.)

I imagine that architects who create such things understand these buildings in ways far different from this in which the rest of us see them. A few things, likely completely obvious to the building designers, occurred to me. One, obvious now that I see it, is that the visual character of the buildings themselves is formed as much by what they reflect of their surroundings as it is by their own shape, texture, and material. Most of what constitutes this photograph, for example, is not the building itself (which is largely defined by the narrow non-reflecting portions) but by what in the surrounding environment is reflected on its surface and how those reflections are shaped and modified by the reflecting surface of the building. In this case, the building reflects itself in the right angles such as the one in the center of this shot, along with the sky, and sometimes the surrounding buildings. (Though the latter is removed when you aim the camera up so sharply.)

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: downtown

Glass Facade

Urban Canyons, Evening

Reflective Building

One Front Street, San Francisco

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