Tag Archives: glass

Photographs: England, Photographs: Nature

Aspen Color, Eastern California

November 14, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Peak autumn color in a small stand of aspens high in a desert mountain range east of the Sierra Nevada

It is no secret that I love aspen trees, especially in the fall, and that I’m a big fan of the aspens along the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada. I photograph them every year, and I have come to know quite a bit about where to find them and how to photograph them in a variety of conditions ranging from sun to clouds and rain to snow. The aspens in this photo are also in California… but just not in the Sierra.

For a while I’ve had the idea to photograph aspens that are east of the range, since I have seen them from time to time while out there, but usually at the “wrong” time of year. This year I had a chance to make such trees the target of some travel, and we went looking for them east of the Sierra between roughly Long Valley and Bridgeport or thereabouts. The specific location of these trees is not all that important, though I’ll say that we came across this stand in some mountains east of the Sierra – as we rounded a bend and dropped into a valley in mostly sagebrush and juniper country, the stunning color of this grove along a small stream bed provided a vivid contrast with the surrounding terrain. We stopped and wandered around the edges of the grove, mostly making photographs of the trees themselves rather than their larger setting. Sierra fall aspen photographers are (sometimes painfully) aware of the ways that aspen leaves can deteriorate in the autumn, including brown or black spotted leaves or trees that go straight to drab dead leaves without passing through a colorful stage. However, the leaves on these trees were among the most perfect I have seen, with barely a blemish and with intense colors covering the spectrum from barely green though golden and on towards orange and red.

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: Austria, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Window Shadows and Reflections

August 19, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The shadows and faint reflections of a window create patterns on a wall in Salzburg, Austria

Although we did not actually stay in Salzburg during out July 2013 travels, we managed to end up there on four of our 7 days in Bavaria. Our trail from Heidelberg arrived in Salzburg and our return train departed here. On a couple of other days we were traveling around the area to visit various features not far from Salzburg, so we ended up there for a few hours – on two occasions having a late lunch, taking part in Salzburg’s “coffee culture,” and then wandering around. We did see some of the main tourist places, such as the square near the Salzburg Cathedral, the castle, and the narrow and bustling (and a bit uncomfortably commercial) streets of the old downtown, but we also managed to walk through a few less busy areas.

Some of these walks took us through some very narrow and old streets between the main part of old Salzburg and the outlying area where we parked. Here the buildings sit right up against the streets, and the streets themselves were obviously constructed in a pre-automobile era since they are barely a single car wide. Many things intrigued me about these narrow streets beside their mere narrowness: the various muted colors of the buildings, the ways the streets twist and turn and come together at odd angles, the interesting way that the light played on the scene as it came down from far above or shone down street that aligned with the sun, and some of the architectural features such as the windows and the interesting metal street lights that seemed to be everywhere. In this photograph the sun was rather high in the sky but almost in line with the street, and the image of the shadows of the open windows almost mirrors the fainter pattern of the reflections from the glass.

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

Turret Skylight, SFMOMA

June 2, 2013 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Midday light inside beneath the skylight in the atrium of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

For the time being I’m not going to write all that I could write about this photograph – that would be far too much to post here. Nonetheless, this might be a slightly longer “photo post” than usual.

The subject is the skylight in the turret at the top of the atrium at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Just below the skylight there is a catwalk that crosses from one side of the cylindrical upper area of the atrium to the other, and this is a place of magical light in almost any conditions. I visited this past Friday since the museum closes after today (June 2, 2013) for two years for renovation and expansion, and I wanted to have one last chance to wander around in the museum and I wanted to see the wonderful Garry Winogrand exhibit.

During the “wandering” part of my visit I went to this catwalk and thought about how I could photograph it. It is almost embarrassing to photograph in this spot, since it is one of the most obvious iconic places to grab an iPhone shot, and many other visitors were doing just that. I first made a few symmetrical photographs looking up at the skylight in a more direct way and then thought that I’d try a few “off kilter” shots, perhaps with the Winogrand images – which often tilt and twist in surprising ways – still in my mind. Having also just spent time in the museum’s wonderful exhibit of classic black and white work by other photographers, I was in a bit of a black and white state of mind, and I was pretty certain that this would end up as a monochrome image.

(For those who wonder about such things, this photograph was made with the small Fujifilm X-E1 camera and the wonderful Fujifilm XF 14mm f/2.8 lens.)

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

Stairway and Broken Windows

March 19, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Exterior staircase, broken windows, and peeling paint on the wooden side panels of an abandoned building near Vallejo, California

I had joined up with a group of night photographers that I often shoot with on this evening, and we were sitting around in the late afternoon hours sharing pizza when someone made the radical suggestion of going out to shoot before darkness arrived! In the past, this has been just about the only group of photographers I’ve ever met who would stay inside during a San Francisco Bay area golden hour and sunset period, anxious for the light to go away so that shooting could begin! But on this evening, the radical concept of shooting in the daylight must have seemed so innovative that quite a few of us headed out to find either landscape-style shots over the San Francisco Bay or else abandoned and dilapidated industrial subjects nearby. I opted for the latter, and hoping to cover a bit more ground before dark, rather than walking nearby I drove, trying to figure out where I wanted to be in the fading light.

I ended up near this lonely, abandoned and partially destroyed building that has been left to vandals, who seem to be doing their best to accelerate the natural destructive forces that eventually take such buildings. Many windows are broken, there is spray paint in many places, and the exterior of the building is tremendously weathered and worn. Just a few minutes before sunset I made a series of exposures of this building, using a long lens to isolate smaller sections of the building. The sunset light turned the otherwise-dull building a much more intense shade of brown/yellow, and the brighter sky and clouds over San Francisco Bay are reflected in the broken windows. Soon after I finished shooting, the sun set, and I headed back to where my nocturnal friends awaited, and we headed out to photograph in the night.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: glass

Aspen Color, Eastern California

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Window Shadows and Reflections

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Turret Skylight, SFMOMA

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Stairway and Broken Windows

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

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