Tag Archives: industrial

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

Yellow Building with Weathered Windows, Night Sky

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Yellow Building with Weathered Windows, Night Sky
Yellow Building with Weathered Windows, Night Sky

Yellow Building with Weathered Windows, Night Sky. Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, California. February 12, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Weathered windows below the eaves of a dilapidated yellow building at Mare Island Naval Ship Yard with star trails in the night sky.

This is another building that I have photographed a number of times when I’ve visited the Mare Island Naval Ship Yard to do night photography. Typically I have focused on the lower walls of the building, which are interesting due to the presence of garish yellow sodium vapor lighting, the interesting texture of corrugated metal walls with peeling paint, dilapidated and broken doors and windows, and the odd presence of a UFO-shaped shadow from a lamp hanging on the exterior. (A recent photo I posted featured that oddity.)

Here I wanted to shoot something a bit less complex and graphically simple – so I aimed the camera almost straight up from a position right in front of the building. Though they are difficult to see in this small jpg, the sky is filled with faint star trails from the two-minute exposure, and I like the way its inky blue-black color contrasts with the very warm colors of the yellow walls that are lit by sodium vapor light coming from multiple directions. The terribly weathered window frame, the bit of conduit attached to the wall, and the broken window panes break up the wall.

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

Turnstile Shadows

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Turnstile Shadows
Turnstile Shadows

Turnstile Shadows. Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, California. February 12, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Shadows cast by sodium vapor lamps shining on old turnstiles at Mare Island Naval Ship Yard.

This old row of abandoned turnstiles stands at the entrance to an alley through which we almost always walk as we begin shooting in the core area of the historic Mare Island Naval Ship Yard near Vallejo, California. It seems odd to see the structure here since now one can just walk around them, but I suspect that this area must have been somewhat secure at times since military ships were built here.

This isn’t an easy subject to photograph. Several of us were talking about how we have struggled to find a composition built around the turnstiles. I have one other photograph that I made a few years ago that I think works pretty well. In that one I aimed a bit higher and let the metal structure pretty much fill the frame, and I also ended up making it a black and white image. (It was used as a cover for a book at one point.) But on this evening a few of us were staring at the turnstiles again and remarking that there must be more photographs in there… somewhere… but that we are still trying to find them.

I thought it might be interesting to make the long and complex patterns of the shadows fill most of the frame, so I moved back just a little and pointed the camera down so that just a portion of the turnstile structure appears at the top of the frame. This also helps with a couple of technical challenges: the bright lights beyond the structure create a tremendously large dynamic range in the scene, and it can be difficult to keep some distracting background elements (like a stop sign!) out of the image. The garish yellow/orange light is from a large sodium vapor lamp that sits above the intersection on the road in the background. That coloration is part of what made me choose to make the previous photograph of this subject black and white, but on this night I decided to go with the color.

The final image is a blend of two exposures. The shorter one was selected to avoid blowing out the brightest areas in the upper part of the frame, and the longer one let me keep a bit more detail in the shadowed asphalt foreground.

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

Lamp, the ‘UFO Building” at Night

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Lamp, the 'UFO Building" at Night
Lamp, the 'UFO Building" at Night

Lamp, the ‘UFO Building” at Night. Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, California. February 12, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A lamp casts a shadow in bright artificial light in a night photograph of the wall of the ‘UFO Building’ at Mare Island Naval Shipyard.

The first time I photographed the side of this weathered and peeling building and Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, I didn’t see the feature that gives this building its informal name. I’ll be that you can though, right? Due to a lucky alignment of this small exterior lamp (which appears to be non-functional) and some nearby sodium vapor lamps, the lamp casts a shadow on the corrugated wall of the building that has a striking and easily recognized shape!

It may not immediately be apparent that this photograph was made at night in very low light. However, a look at the lighting should make it apparent that this cannot be daytime light. Note that the lamp that creates a shadow to its right… is also getting some nice illumination from the right side! One of the fun things about shooting in an industrial location like Mare Island is the amazing mixture of lighting sources. Though it wasn’t much of an influence on this night, the full moon can provide light that is color balanced pretty much like daylight… only a lot dimmer. The sodium vapor lamps that light this area (they are common in street lamps) produce a strongly yellow or yellow/red light. Occasional fluorescent or tungsten lamps provide yet more color variations. In the end, it is just about impossible to say what kind of color balance is “real” – and doubly-so since the actual shooting conditions are near darkness. The only reason that images like this look daylight-bright is because they are typically the result of long exposures. In fact, this one was relatively short at just over a minute. Somewhere in the 2 to 5 minute range is perhaps more typical.

The crazy lighting is apparent in this image if you look a bit more closely. As mentioned above, there is cross lighting here from both sides of the frame. While the strongest light comes from the left (and creates that UFO shadow) there is also significant light from a bit further away to the right. You may also be able to see that the in some areas the shadows created by light from one side are filled in by garishly colored lights coming from the other directions – see some of the very yellow areas along the sides of vertical boards and along the ridges of the corrugated wall.

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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: New York City, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Textures, Photographs: Urban/Street

Parking Lot Near High Line Park

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Parking Lot Near High Line Park
Parking Lot Near High Line Park

Parking Lot Near High Line Park. New York, New York. August 14, 2010. © Copyright 2010 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Evening photograph of an urban parking lot near the High Line Elevated Park in the Chelsea area of New York City.

I photographed this parking facility from above as we started down the stairs at the north end of High Line Park. Since I was traveling light at this point I had no tripod – so I made this 1/8 second exposure hand-held. (Image stabilization can be your friend!) Lighting was, to say the least, tricky. Areas of the structure were in deep shadow, but there were also bright artificial light directly within the frame. By some miracle I managed to pretty much capture the full dynamic range in one shot.

These parking elevators are seen all over Manhattan, and they allow cars to be parked several deep on the vertical lift. This was the first time I had the opportunity to shoot one from a position that wasn’t on the ground, and the complicated mass of vertical beams filling the space and lit by artificial light sources seemed like an interesting subject. I haven’t seen the elevators in operation, so I still wonder how the lot operators manage to get the right cars at the top/bottom of each lift so that each person’s car will be at ground level at the right time.

G Dan Mitchell Photography
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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.

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