Tag Archives: downtown

Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: San Francisco

San Francisco, Winter Evening

February 29, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Downtown buildings of San Francisco, California stand beneath a winter sky at dusk.

On New Year’s Day 2012, we joined a group of “photo walkers” who were shooting some of the old military structures high in the Marin Headlands area across the Golden Gate and north of San Francisco. After meeting up with all of them and photographing these interesting old sites, we left them as they went off to photograph Rodeo Beach. (We realized that we would need to get back home a bit earlier since my plan was to leave for six days in Death Valley the next morning… and I had not yet packed!)

Since we were already in the area, we took a quick detour up to the Hawk Hill area high on Conzelman Road to check out that famous view across the Golden Gate Bridge toward San Francisco and points beyond. I don’t go here every time I’m in the area, but if I’m already there, it is about to be sunset, I have an extra half hour, and there is the potential for interesting light… what the heck! Once we got there I noticed that some winter haze was distinctly softening the light as the sun was just about to set, and this created a beautiful glowing gradient of colors in the sky and washed the City in pastel light. In this photograph I resisted the temptation to pump things (contrast and saturation) a lot, and intend tried to maintain the subtle coloration of the scene.

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Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Railing, Stairs, and Window – Museum of Modern Art

September 28, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Edge of an upper landing with a railing, stairs, and windows at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

I think I have visited, at least briefly, the Museum of Modern Art every time I have been in New York City. (As a “west coaster” that isn’t all that often, but still…) My secret is that photographing inside and around the museum is, for me, almost as interesting as viewing the exhibits. There is a ton of interesting subject material to work with: the people, the interior (and to a lesser extent, exterior) architecture of the place, details that can be found by looking around a bit, the surrounding neighborhoods, and juxtapositions of any and all of these things.

We visited a wonderful show of photography when we were there this year, and at the end of a hallway outside the entrance to this show I saw this translucent wall of windows with a glow enhanced by, if I recall correctly, some cloudiness outside. Shooting quickly with the 50mm prime that was on my camera, I first grabbed some shots mostly of these windows. Then I tried a few that focused more on the stairway seen here at lower right. Finally, I narrowed it down to just this bit of curving railing and floor, throwing the rest of the scene out of focus by shooting at the largest aperture.

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Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Fire Escape Ladder, Brick Building

September 22, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 5 Comments

On the final morning of our August (2011) visit to New York City, we took the subway down toward the lower end of the island to meet our son – the plan being to walk though Soho and (I think) the West Village, ending up at a gallery in Chelsea. After taking care of the most pressing bit of initial business – coffee – we wandered on through Soho… and I think this photograph was made there.

New Yorkers undoubtedly know exactly is going on with this light, but for the rest of the world… the morning sun was passing through a relatively narrow gap between buildings to strike this brick wall and partially pick off this green emergency exit zigzagging down the front of this building. In a lot of ways, this isn’t totally different from shooting natural landscapes – go out early, look for interesting subjects, find good light, make photographs. It isn’t totally the same – duh! – either. Not only can you walk here from coffee, but we (my son and I) shot without tripods, and I stuck to a single 50mm prime to keep things simple.

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

Bridge, Olympic Sculpture Park

September 13, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A bridge crosses railroad tracks at the Olympic Sculpture Park, Washington.

Back in 2008 I travelled to Seattle on mostly family business. I arrived a bit early and ended up spending some time wandering around the Olympic Sculpture Park, a place I enjoy both for the art and for the architecture and other features of this public space.

The bridge across the railroad tracks had interested me previously, but I’ve found it a difficult subject to photograph – somewhat surprisingly, since it seems to me like such an obvious thing to photograph. So in this image I more or less obscured most of the bridge itself, leaving not much more than the white vertical supports along its exterior and its overall shape and mass. I thought that the relationships between the texture of the metal bridge and the concrete underneath was interesting, as were some of the relationships between various shapes and angles. As I have done in a few other recent photographs, I played around with “pure” color and black and white renditions of the image – in the end deciding to sort of split the difference, thinking that a somewhat de-saturated color image might be most in line with my memory of the place and the scene on that winter day.

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