Tall buildings soar into foggy sky in the financial district of San Francisco, California.
I’ll keep the commentary short on this one – it is part of a series that already includes the commentary, and today I prefer not to write a lot. The photograph was made on a San Francisco walk that eventually took me across a short section of the Embarcadero and then up into the area just north of the financial district. From there I walked into that district and focused on photographing the tall buildings found there, looking for odd and interesting juxtapositions and thinking about how I could use the weather conditions – which included high clouds, sprinkles of rain, and ocean fog sliding in over the City and obscuring the tops of the buildings.
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
A lamp-post in front of the Embarcadero Center and Maritime Plaza buildings, San Francisco.
The buildings in this photograph are in the financial district of San Francisco, very close to the Embarcadero, the roadway that travels along the waterfront where all of the old shipping piers are located. The taller building to the left is part of the Embarcadero Center, a major landmark along the waterfront, and the darker building occupying much of the rest of the frame is the Maritime Plaza Building, one that I’m less familiar with. The lamp-post is… a lamp post.
This summer, while my wife has been involved in an ongoing musical event in The City, I’ve been taking advantage of this to spend more time that usual wandering around the downtown area and making photographs. I have a number of general ideas in mind for photographs, but one thread has been to shoot the large forms of these buildings at odd angles, often with fog or bright sky above. Recently I was thinking about some of the factors that attract me to shooting here. One is, obviously, that this is where the large urban downtown closest to me is located – it is an hour drive away and I can get there by public transit in not much more time than that. It occurred to me yesterday that San Francisco is perhaps the most likely place to find “interesting” weather this time of year here in otherwise mostly blue-sky-boring California – between full sun and dense fog, there are a lot of visually interesting conditions to be found here… occasionally all at once!
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
Fog rolls in over Drakes Estero beyond Home Bay, Point Reyes National Seashore.
This little late-July visit to Point Reyes was an opportunity to re-learn a few lessons about going out to make photographs. I had driven up to San Francisco, where my wife was to be engaged in a music performance that would take the full afternoon and evening, with the plan being to drop her off and then drive on over the Golden Gate Bridge and out to Point Reyes. Point Reyes is often a cold and windy place, even in the summer, but this was a very warm period and it looked like the coast might be clear of fog or at least see the fog bank lurking just offshore until the evening. With this in mind, it seemed like it might be a good time to either visit the Limantour Beach area or else hike out towards Drakes Bay.
I should have sensed that things were about to evolve in ways that I had not planned for when, during a brief stop at the Point Reyes visitor center, the rangers announced that the road to Limantour was closed since a fire had just started in the area! With that option gone, I figured that Drakes Bay would be my objective, and I had images of afternoon and evening light on this day of little or no fog. I drove on out to the Estero trailhead where it was, in fact, quite sunny, though a bit windy. I loaded up my camera pack with a few lenses and a tripod, and set out on the trail towards Drakes Head, thinking I might be able to make it there for late afternoon light. As soon as I started hiking I began to see the telltale puffs of incoming fog clouds above me, and soon I came around a bend in the trail to see that the fog had already moved in to my west and over Drakes Bay. Fortunately, I like for, and in most cases I would rather photograph in “interesting” weather than in so-called perfect blue sky weather. At a point where the trail descended to cross a dike at the head of Home Bay, I saw this conjunction of near and far forms, with the distant bluffs under the incoming fog, so I stopped to make a few photographs before moving on. To make a potentially long story a bit shorter, the temperature quickly dropped and the wind picked up to levels that made photography increasingly difficult. I managed to work with one other scene that included a curving snag in front of the bay, but it was already becoming difficult to find a calm moment in the wind to click the shutter. I kept going, finally reaching the trail junction that heads off towards Drakes Head, only to realize that I would never get all the way out there in time to return before dark. Cutting the hike short after a bit more than an hour and a half of hiking, I began to retrace my steps back to the trailhead.
In the end, this is really the only photograph that I came away with – despite carrying that fully loaded camera pack out and back! But this reminded me of a first lesson, namely that it is worth the effort even if I only come back with a single shot that I like. This one, to me, evokes the relative isolation and quiet of this spot in the upper reaches of the calm waters of Drakes Bay, with the fog bank beginning to assemble across the distant bluffs. A second lesson is that sometimes on a photographic quest, it is OK to simply enjoy the surroundings. A practical photographer can remind himself or herself that scouting is a good thing, and that things not photographed this time may well be on a future visit. And a long-time hiker can – and did – remind himself that sometimes it is just fine to leave the camera in the pack and just enjoy the wind and the 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
California harbor seals interacting on a haul-out rock at the Point Lobos State Reserve.
The harbor seals are found in many areas of the California cost and elsewhere. These were lounging about on a haul-out rock at the Point Lobos State Reserve just south of Carmel and at the northern end of the Big Sur coastline. I have been going to Point Lobos for many years, and this particular rock is one I usually check out since it is quite close to the shoreline and there are often harbor seals about. Indeed, on this day there were perhaps a dozen of the critters on this rock, and more were hanging around nearby.
On one hand, it seems like a pretty lazy life they lead, especially on a calm summer day like this one. Haul out of the water and lounge about on rocks for hours. If they get hungry, the water is only a few feet away. But I suspect that the reality is much different. I have also gone to see them in the winter when the surf here can be astonishingly wild, and the ocean must be a very dangerous place. As I watched this group – which is sometimes an experience close to watching paint dry – eventually the middle seal decided to turn around and face the smaller one to the left. As it did so it arched its body to pivot around and the smaller one reached out with a flipper, suggesting a sort of friendly pat to the those with anthropomorphic tendencies.
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 whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
