Two people walk past the closed storefront of Boulanger Coquelicot at night, Paris
This will be a brief post today… I made this photograph last August on an evening in Montemartre when we went out to look for a place to grab dinner. We passed this bakery, a place that our son and daughter-in-law had told us they had visited when they were here a few months earlier, and I figured I should photograph it. The location was quite dark and I was shooting handheld, so the long exposure allowed the furtive, hurrying figures to blur a bit.
Clouds from a passing weather front and the beginning of a dust storm above desert mountains and valley
If you follow my daily photographic posts, you just might recognize this scene — given that I’ve been posting variations on it for the past couple of weeks! (As you may have gathered, my daily shared photographs are not the same as my “Best of…” work. Instead they are, among other things, a way to stay “on assignment” and work out and try a variety of ideas.) So far, the variations on this general subject have included both monochrome and color versions and vertical and horizontal formats.
There were several challenges with this scene on location, some technical and some esthetic. Technical challenges included the extreme variations in the light, from the brilliantly lit clouds to the left foreground canyon in deep shadow. This was a challenge for which I realized that part of the solution could come in post, as long as I was careful with the highlights in the exposure. Compositional questions included how much of that dark foreground mass to include (with the presumption that some detail could be retained there), where to place various lines relative to the edges of the frame, and how much sky to include. While I first wanted to keep the hazy light on the mountains on the far side of the valley very brightly luminous, it seemed that their detail could be lost against the large dark areas. In any case, this is one of the current “finalists” among the group I’m considering.
Clouds from a passing weather front and the beginning of a dust storm above desert mountains and valley
The light and atmospheric effects in the desert can be quite varied, though we are perhaps most familiar with the least interesting conditions, the heat and clarity of midday. (Even that has an appeal, but for me it often isn’t photographic.) But go there often enough and at different times of year, and you will witness an astonishing diversity of conditions. I’ve been at this location in extreme heat, gale force winds, snow, light rain, quite evening light, and more. The conditions on this morning were not unprecedented in my experience, but the combination was marvelous.
We arrived at this ridgeline location just before sunrise and, as is often the case, there were clouds above the ridges far to the east that would block the light of the rising sun. Such clouds can be a photographic blessing (when the light up the right way) or a curse (when they simply block the light and leave everything gray). After a very brief bit of color along the distant horizon it looked like this was going to be a gray morning. Fortunately, we stuck around! Since the light on the grand landscape was “challenging,” we turned out attention to closer and smaller things, and while we were thus distracted the landscape and sky were transformed. A weather front was passing by, and beautiful clouds began to stack up above us and to the east. A milky haze across the valley gave the first hints of a monumental dust storm that would arrive by the afternoon. The light everywhere was a luminescent blue and it illuminated the stark forms of the dry wash running up into the desert mountains beneath us.
Shadows from a fire escape fall across the front of a San Francisco building
I made this photograph late in the day back in early September, on a street photography shoot with a group of like-minded folks in San Francisco. We met in the late afternoon, wandered about for a while in the beautiful late-day light, then broke for dinner before going back out to photograph after dark.
One one hand, you could probably find a similar scene in many other cities. On the other hand, it also evokes the architecture of San Francisco, where buildings are packed tightly together, often with seemingly little regard for their aesthetic appearance when viewed from the street — with the result being very utilitarian facades, often featuring metal gates, fire escapes, and sometimes a worn and weathered appearance. This street runs almost directly east-west, so late in the day the sunlight was falling across the front of the building at a low angle and casting strong shadows.
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.
