Tag Archives: island

Parking Structure

December 15, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Parking structure and urban scene near the Highline Park in New York City

When in New York City… visit the Highline Park, as we did on this 2010 summer visit. For those who may not know, the Highline Park is a novel New York location, a park high above the streets that occupies the right of way of an old elevated railway. It is widely regarded as one of the most innovative public spaces in this city, and it really is a remarkable place.

It is also a great place to do photography. There are plenty of people subjects there, and there is all of the other stuff that is worth shooting in New York, plus the elevated perspective provides a lot of views that are different from those seen from street level. We’ve all seen this urban parking structures, which stack cars up several deep in order to make more efficient use of limited space. But we don’t often see them from above, where the metal framing suggests planes that aren’t visible from below but which connect in interesting ways with the angled lines and planes of the other nearby buildings.

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: Urban/Street

The Lake, Central Park

December 10, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Summer boaters on The Lake, Central Park, Manhattan

After watching a friend take on the task of posting a continuous string of black and white photographs during the holiday season this year, I have posted more monochrome photographs than usual, with a number of them coming from a backlog of older work that sits in the raw file archives. This has provided a bit of a necessary nudge to go back and revisit some of those older photographs. I haven’t taken a very systematic approach to this nostalgic review of the older work, instead almost randomly dropping in on the files from different years and subjects. A recent look at some older Sierra Nevada photographs took me back to 2010, and it wasn’t a long trip from there to a collection of photographs from a summer 2010 visit to New York City.

I think that 2010 was the first time I visited New York City in August. New Yorkers are perhaps rolling their eyes, knowing all about August weather there, but I was innocent. Now I know. (And, strange as it seems, I actually chose to go back this past August! I’m starting to get used to it and to perhaps even embrace the heat and humidity.) The Central Park location of this photograph is probably fairly obvious — we wandered through portions of the park and ended up near The Lake, where park visitors rowed slowly and serenely within sight of Manhattan’s urban buildings.

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Ocean & Coast

Pelicans Along the Coast

May 19, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A line of pelicans flies along the Point Lobos Reserve coastline

Brown pelicans are probably my favorite Pacific coast birds, and I often like to photograph them when I visit the nearby Pacific Ocean shoreline. However, that’s not at all what I was at Point Lobos to photograph on this late April morning. I was more in a landscape or seascape frame of mind. That said, this photograph is an example of how things most definitely do not happen in a slow, considered, or contemplative manner when shooting landscape subjects.

I was thinking about how to try to photograph the elements of very choppy near-shore water, the further rocks that we partially obscured by mist and spray, the subtle shadings of the offshore fog bank, and the blue tones of sky. I decided to use a long lens and try to line up something that included nearby shoreline elements juxtaposed with the more distant rocks. I wasn’t having an easy time coming up with a composition that I liked. I must have momentarily looked up from the camera, because I recall spotting this line of pelicans flying up from the south and thinking that if I could just operate fast enough I might be able to get them in the frame. Being set for landscape (manual exposure and focus, live view, small aperture, on the tripod), that meant trying to quickly and intuitively make a whole bunch of quick changes. I must have managed to do so just in time to squeeze off three frames as the line of birds passed through this gap in the rocks and continued on.

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Ocean & Coast

Sea Stacks, Big Sur Coastline

February 3, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The receding ridges of the Big Sur coastline arc southward into winter haze beyond a pair of large sea stacks.

On the final day of January we did the “down and back” drive through the Big Sur area of California’s Pacific Coast Highway. This is my favorite time of year in this part of California. At one point along the drive I made a comment (as I often do while passing through here at this time of year) about how this weather felt more like a “typical summer day” than like a “typical winter day” – and then I quickly caught myself and recalled that “typical summer days” here often feature thick fog, wind, and cold. On the other hand, between Pacific storms – or during a dry year like this one – a typical winter day may feature brilliant sunshine and long vistas and temperatures that are as warm as those of summer here.

As the day developed I shifted from looking for the effects of first and early light coming over ridges and into canyons, or the thinning offshore clouds. Instead I started to think about the long coastal vistas, the intense reflection of the ocean seen from high places (which always makes me think of molten metal), and the way that the backlit atmosphere highlights receding ridges as they disappear into the distance. As we came over one of the high points and around the corner the road began to drop and this view appeared in front of us, with two sea stacks in the foreground (one of which contains a natural arch) and the rugged coastline curving toward the south.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: island

Parking Structure

The Lake, Central Park

Sea Stacks, Big Sur Coastline

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