I’m pretty certain that I made this photograph on the evening of our arrival in Paris in the summer of 2016. We came from London the train, arrived in the afternoon, checked into a hotel, and headed out to explore. We were staying in Montemartre, which is a fine place to wander, with narrow streets, hills, and plenty of places to eat and drink.
A bit later, at dusk, we were walking through a residential area when we passed this empty and apparently abandoned lot. It appeared that it had been commandeered by graffiti artists, who produced everything from text to images. My sense was that this produced a sort of urban landscape, and as different as this look from, say, the Sierra Nevada, it photographed it in a similar way in the fading light.
A deserted Montmartre intersection in the evening “blue hour,” Paris
This past August we stayed in Montemartre during our weeklong visit to Paris. We went to many places in Paris, often on foot, but we obviously ended up spending quite of bit of time in Montmartre near our hotel — going out on walks, looking for restaurants, returning from other adventures. This area is more hilly that other parts of Paris, so here the narrow and twisting streets also wind up and down hills in many places.
I’m not certain at the moment where we were headed on this evening, though there is a pretty good chance that it involved food! It might have been on our first night in Paris, when we didn’t yet know our way around the local area and we went out for what amounted to a random walk. I made the photograph during that brief interval between night and day, the “blue hour,” when all areas in shadow are lit by the blue wash of light from the sky. At the moment I made this photograph the light was dimming, just enough that the brightest street lights were beginning to create pools of warmer light.
The bleached remains of an old dead tree lie on the rocks of a dry subalpine tarn, Kings Canyon National Park
This year was the second of two very dry years in the Sierra Nevada and much of the west. The snowfall this past winter (2012-13) was far below normal and set records in some places. Last October and November it seemed like we might be starting a very wet season, which would have been welcome after the previous winter’s low levels of precipitation, but then the tap was shut off near the end of the year and there was hardly any more precipitation at all during the rest of the season, the portion when the majority of the Sierra’s precipitation falls. Consequently, this has been a strange summer in the Sierra. Although there may have been more monsoonal rain the usual, the effects of the depleted snow pack are obvious. The spring run-off occurred early and was anemic. By July much of the Sierra looked more like August, and I was already seeing signs of fall by early August.
With all of this in mind, it was no surprise to use to find some unusually dry conditions in the Kings Canyon back-country when we visited for more than a week in mid-September. (Though, in some ways, things were less horrendous than I might have expected. Perhaps this was a combination of going at a time when things tend to be dry anyway and, as a local pointed out to me, some recent summer rains.) On our first day at the location where we stayed to photograph for nearly a week I wandered up some nearby meadows towards a lake that I though I might want to photograph. Very close to my campsite I found several completely dry tarns. (A “tarn” is a seasonal pond fed by snowmelt, and many of them dry up each season.) This very old, sun bleached snag lay across the exposed rocks of this one, creating a stark images.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
The interior of an abandoned waterfront building on the Embarcadero, San Francisco.
This interior is a room in a building located on one of the piers along the Embarcadero on San Francisco’s waterfront. This one is located not far from the South Beach Harbor. It seems to be one of those old structures that was recently adapted for use by companies that had the “look” of being part of the tech boom in the city – perhaps design firms or similar. I have walked past it many times, occasionally photographing the exterior windows and other features, but otherwise not noticing it all that much.
On my last walk past this spot things had changed, to say the least. There were signs along entrances that declared that the pier had been closed, ostensibly for safety reasons, and that no trespassing was allowed. No one seemed to be inside the building, and most of the businesses appeared to have left or been abandoned. Though one set of windows I could see stacks of boxes labelled with intended mail recipients, but that mail wasn’t going anywhere! Near the north end of the building I could see into this sun-filled room, with its tall windows facing the bay and the morning sun. Almost everything was removed from the building, giving it almost the same abandoned feeling that I often experience when shooting at Mare Island. I managed to push my camera up against a window, block reflections from the street behind me with my hand, and make a few perhaps final photographs of this space.
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. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
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.
