Tag Archives: home

Door, Steps, and Window

Door, Steps, and Window
The front of an urban Pasadena building at twilight

Door, Steps, and Window. Pasadena, California. January 6, 2017. © Copyright 2017 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

The front of an urban Pasadena building at twilight

Here I’ll interject an “urban landscape” into the stream of mostly natural landscape photographs that I’ve recently posted. This photograph comes from a visit to Southern California, mostly in the Pasadena area, just after the New Year’s Day Holiday. We were there for a family event, but there were plenty of opportunities to do street and similar kinds of photography in the characteristic Southern California environment.

We had been out walking in the afternoon, and as evening came on it was that time that is so magical for handheld street photography, the time just after sunset when there is still ambient light as artificial lights start to come on and take over the landscape. We continued to wander, taking a big look back into central Pasadena and past some residential areas where I found this little vignette.


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.
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Old Home

Old Home
The front of an old home in Neckarsteinach, Heidelberg, Germany area

Old Home. Neckarsteinach, Heidelberg, Germany. August 14, 2016. © Copyright 2016 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

The front of an old home in Neckarsteinach, Heidelberg, Germany area

I’ll keep the commentary brief on this one. We traveled by boat a short distance up the Neckar River from the Altstadt Heidelberg area last summer and stopped here to wander a bit and to eat. Our wandering took us up and down some narrow, twisty, hill streets and past some beautifully weathered homes.


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.
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All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Home Away From Home

Home Away From Home
My camp for a week in the Yosemite backcountry, September 2015

Home Away From Home. Yosemite National Park, California. September 11, 2015 © Copyright 2015 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

My camp for a week in the Yosemite backcountry, September 2015


For the past few years I have escaped to the mountains (or desert, in one case) each fall or late summer for uninterrupted photography. Perhaps a half-dozen years ago I was fortunate enough to be able to join up with the five photographers whose work appears in the book “First Light: Five Photographers Explore Yosemite’s Wilderness.” The first year I more or less ran into the group (Charles Cramer, Scot Miller, Mike Osborne, Keith Walklet, Karl Kroeber) — they were on a pack-train supported weeklong-plus trip, and had backpacked in to the same area where I ran into them briefly. The next year I “crashed” their lengthy back-country trip for a few days; the following year I was still a backpacker (they used pack animals) but I joined them for the better part of a week. Since that time I’ve joined all or part of the group for a week or more each fall. (I’m grateful to all of them for welcoming me to join them.)

This year a smaller group of us spent a bit more than a week camped at a single Yosemite backcountry location. For someone with years of backpacking experience, typically moving from place to place each day, staying in one spot for so long has been a revelation. At first I wondered how in the world there will be enough to keep me busy for a week or more. Then half way through the trip I typically realize that I have just enough time to photograph the things I decide are important to work on, only to discover on the final day or two that I could probably actually use another half week or more! The photograph shows my backcountry home for a week this past September, at the end of a granite slab that extended almost all the way to the lake that was our home base.

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.
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All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Pipes, Window, Stucco Wall, and Shadows

Pipes, Window, Stucco Wall, and Shadows
Pipes, Window, Stucco Wall, and Shadows

Pipes, Window, Stucco Wall, and Shadows. San Jose, California. March 16, 2013. © Copyright 2013 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Late winter shadows fall across a suburban scene composed of a stucco wall, pipes, and a window

This is the second of two “walking around” photographs made in my neighborhood while wandering around with a camera and a couple of lenses. These walks are exercises in seeing, in several ways: When I carry the camera I pay a lot more attention to things around me that I would otherwise simply not see at all, and the process of looking and seeing photographs in places that are so mundane that I might regularly walk past them helps “tune up” my seeing skills.

As I often do, on this walk I was paying a lot of attention to shadows falling across the walls of buildings. As I write in my last photo post, once I started noticing the shadows, which are everywhere in this area, I began to see the buildings differently. For example, here is a building that I might otherwise have simply thought of as a tan building. But now it is a building with branches “painted” over almost its entire surface. And in this one, the branch shadows converge on the mundane little collection of faucets and wires and what-not at the lower left, then spread and open up to surround the white window frame above and to the right.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist 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.