This is not normally the direction I point the camera… but sometimes there are interesting things to see right at your feet! I had stopped at a playa whose edge is right next to the main highway into Death Valley. I got our and wandered out on to the playa. (This might be the world’s easiest walking.)
This play a is typically dry, and after the rare storms that bring enough rain to create mud, the playa surface dries out and cracks into interesting patterns. As I wandered around this visual playground I spied this rather unusual patten in the surface of teh playa.
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.
A window in an old building in the Heidelberg area, Germany
Yes, I still have more photographs from this past summer’s visits to New York, London, and several European locations — lots more! After London and Paris we headed to Germany, and returned to Heidelberg, which almost seems like a home base for us. Patty’s brother and his wife live there, and in the middle of five weeks of travel it was wonderful to spend time in their Heidelberg home.
This time we hopped on a boat and travelled up the river a ways to a more distant suburb (?) of Heidelberg, where things feel a bit more rustic, at least to this first-time visitor to that particular spot. When we got there we spent some time simply wandering around, walking up narrow and hilly streets. I spotted this window in a weathered wall along the shaded side of one of the buildings we passed — so on this one week anniversary of the American election you get a heart in a window.
Graffiti and poster remnants on a green and blue Brooklyn brick wall.
We arrived in New York late the day before, in time to check in to lodgings and meet our “kids” (two sons and their fiances) for dinner, but there wasn’t a lot of time to get around and see and photograph. The next morning we met up with our youngest son in the more or less the Williamsburg area, and we wandered about, hitting the waterfront of the East River and then finding lunch.
During any bit of urban wandering I’m almost always on the lookout for photographs. Photographing on the street is an exercise in working quickly and being versatile. In most cases I don’t have a specific subject in mind — the closest to that may be a general idea of looking a buildings or people or water or interiors or… In this case I was in an area with a lot of older construction, and we passed through a few spots that were obviously the hope to lots of posters and graffiti. Oddly, since people are sometimes trying to paint out the tagging, there can be many layers of often new paint, posters in various states of decay, and odds and ends of painted words and images. Here the remnants of a poster partially obscured a hand drawn heart on a wall that appeared to have been painted in two not quite identical shades of blue-green.
An old dirt road winds into the heart of an aspen grove in full autumn color, Dixie National Forest, Utah
This is another of the “could have been anywhere” photographs, both because little scenes like this can be found all over the American West and because it is a scene that I simply happened to notice while passing by. So, the specific location is most certainly unimportant, though I’ll say that it was along a gravel road running through a section of the national forest in roughly the Zion/Cedar City area, a road that we had turned up more or less randomly and then explored for perhaps a couple of hours before turning back. The goal of that little drive had been to get into or as close as possible to some extensive forests of colorful aspen trees that we had seen from a distance. We succeeded.
There is something evocative on a number of levels about a simple scene like this one – with factors including the literal and subjective aspects of the changing season, the image of the small road disappearing into the grove as it wanders off to an unknown place, and the light of autumn filtered through the golden canopy of aspen leaves. If you don’t pay careful attention when you are there you might miss it, but the golden color suffuses the entire understory when the light is just right. (Photographers and painters may notice this sort of thing more than most people, since we/they are used to dealing with the otherwise blue coloration of the shadow light.) This sort of scene is extremely transitory. While we can permit ourselves to believe that both the green time of summer and the snowy time of winter are relatively permanent, no such illusion is possible during the brief span of literally a few days when the aspen color comes to these groves – they are different every day, and sometimes you can literally see the color going away as the wind blows down the leaves.
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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