Tag Archives: holiday

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B&H Black Friday Specials

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Site sponsor B&H Photo has a bunch of Black Friday Specials this week – starting today at 9:00 a.m. Some highlights include:

See the main Main Black Friday Specials link for more.

Visit the Deals Page here on this site for other ongoing specials, including ‘instant savings” price reductions on Canon lenses and camera/lens bundles. As always, your purchases though these links on my blog help support this website. Thanks!

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.
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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: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Holiday Lights, Shadows

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Holiday Lights, Shadows - Late afternoon light on holiday lights on a trellis casts shadows on a cloth backdrop.
Late afternoon light on holiday lights on a trellis casts shadows on a cloth backdrop.

Holiday Lights, Shadows. San Jose, California. December 28, 2011. © Copyright 2011 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Late afternoon light on holiday lights on a trellis casts shadows on a cloth backdrop.

For some reason, each year around this time it occurs to me to simply walk out my front door and wander around making photographs more or less in my neighborhood. It is an interesting experience that I think every photographer should try. The first time I tried this locally I “saw” things that I had not noticed during decades living in the area. In addition, looking for things to photograph in what might seem like an unlikely location serves to “tune up” my ability to see, and it helps me renew my ability to look past the obvious to find different subjects and different ways to look at them.

At one point on this “photo walk,” I wandered through a parking lot behind some shops. I photographed the back of a building that had an interesting shadow from an exterior staircase and around which interior furniture was arranged… outside. Then as I walked back across the parking lot I happened to see this trellis covered with strings of holiday lights, catching the warm late-afternoon sun and casting shadows on a sheet of canvas hung behind it.

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

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.

Commentary, News, Site News

Two Holiday Rituals

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I have two holiday photographic rituals this time of year. I have begun one and will soon get to work on the other.

Today I began going through all of my raw files from 2010. I don’t even know how many thousands of files there must be, and it is perhaps better that I don’t know! Each time I do this year-end review I find a number of photographs with potential that I did not see right after I made them. Sometimes it simply takes a bit of distance in order to see what is there; other times I just moved on to another project before I was truly finished with the previous one. Don’t be surprised to see of these photographs posted here over the next few weeks.

Soon I’ll begin the second task, trying to pick my favorite photographs of 2010. I also enjoy this since the process lets me revisit and relive some of the experiences I had as I made the photographs. Given that I work from my “daily photograph” pool, it should be easier than reviewing the raw files – instead of thousands of files there are only a few hundred. However, it always turns out to be harder than I think it will be. I think there are perhaps two reasons. First, while most of the raw files are not really worth a second look, the photographs from which I select the “favorite of the year” images are all images that I like. This makes it very hard to narrow the selection down to perhaps ten or twelve photographs. Second, in some ways I am the least qualified to understand my photographs. That may sound odd, but no one else can see them in the same way that I do since I was there when they were made and thus know things about them that only I can know. Other viewers are perhaps better able to simply view them “as photographs.”

Regarding the second task, feel free to share your ideas and suggestions concerning the selection process or even to suggest specific photographs that might have connected with you.

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Photographs: Night, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: San Francisco

Embarcadero Waterfront With Holiday Lights

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Embarcadero Waterfront With Holiday Lights. San Francisco, California. December 21, 2008. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Photograph of the San Francisco waterfront and skyline with holiday lights, including the Transamerica building and the Embarcadero. Photographed from Treasure Island.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

This photograph was made two years ago just before Christmas. The scene includes the San Francisco Bay waterfront decked out in holiday lights, especially the Embarcadero Buildings and the Transamerica Pyramid, as seen from Treasure Island.

This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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