Tag Archives: light

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

Museum Windows, Shadows

February 26, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Silhouetted figures, windows, and beams of light, Metropolitan Museum

This is a second “take” on a location I photographed between Christmas and New Year’s Day last year, when we spent a week in New York. It was an exceptionally cold week, and on a few days we decided that we really needed to find indoor activities. (On other days we defied the cold and wind and walked all over Manhattan anyway.) One of the reliable options is a visit to a museum, so we headed to the Metropolitan, where we wanted to see the David Hockney show. You can’t see it in this photograph, but the museum was packed with other visitors who were also looking for a warm, indoor option.

We passed through this room twice, on our way to and from a section of the museum with relatively modern art that we wanted to view. This space is really essentially a very wide walkway, though I suspect that it could also be used for exhibits at times. The row of tall windows along the southern wall opened to Central Park and, further away, the Manhattan skyline. Lots of people took advantage of the wide window sills as a place to sit. The resulting effects of light were intriguing — backlit people in a variety of poses, the faint image of the park and city outside, and the alternative effects of shadows and reflections from the bright light streaming through the windows.

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

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

Coastal Cliffs, Mist And Shadows

February 25, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Morning light illuminates ocean mist between cliffs descending to the Pacific Ocean

While spending a February morning and early afternoon photographing along the Big Sur coastline I passed by a rather famous and often crowded spot. Having visiting and photographed there many times, I wasn’t all that interested in stopping this time. However, I did look as I passed by, and I thought I saw some interesting light and spray down at the base of these cliffs.

By the time I saw it, there was no time to stop, so I continued on a bit, found a turnout, reversed direction and came back to look more closely. At this morning hour the western-facing cliffs are usually still in shadow, but the sun begins to rise high enough to send beams of light between them, lighting the mist and spray from surf and intensifying the color or the near-shore waters.

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

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

Winter Light and Cross Walks

February 17, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Winter backlight illuminates pedestrians and cross walks in Manhattan

People in cross walks seems to be becoming a bit of a theme here. I think that a reason may be that people tend to stay more or less in one place a bit longer while waiting to cross and their paths are more constrained while crossing the street. On top of that, encountering the temporary end of the sidewalk at a street corner does tend to face people into groups, and once the light changes they retain some connection to the group for a moment.

A few other factors appealed to me in this scene, and it wasn’t just the people. The light was wonderful, low winter light coming up the street from Lower Manhattan, and impossible to keep its sources out of the camera’s field of view in this shot. That produced the soft glare of light in front of the buildings on the right and it backlit the figures and case long shadows. Those shadows cross perpendicular to the light-colored lines of the cross walk, with become wider as they get closer to my camera position.

Photographs: San Francisco

South Beach Harbor, Morning

February 3, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Morning light on South Beach Harbor and buildings of downtown San Francisco

On this late-January morning I was up — you know the drill… “hours before dawn” — to catch a train up the Peninsula to San Francisco for a morning of street photographer and a visit to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where an extensive show of Walker Evans photography was nearing the end of its run. (At some point I should write a bit about my response to the show. A quick summary: great show, some brilliant work, some work I identify with personally, some work that makes me wonder why it is on the wall.) For these trips I’m usually up around 4:00 AM, giving me a half hour for coffee and a quick breakfast before I walk to catch a bus to the train station, where I catch one of the “baby bullet” express trains that has me in San Francisco an hour later.

The weather was in flux, and when by the time I arrived it was clear that a dome of solid high clouds was over San Francisco. However, as I left the train just before sunrise I was able to see some light on the underside of the clouds that was apparently coming from a gap in the cloud cover across the Bay to the east. I quickly headed over to the nearest shoreline location and ended up at the South Beach Harbor. I found some unusual light here as the sun rise. The light was coming through a narrow gap between the western edge of the cloud shield and the low, East Bay hills. Meanwhile, the clouds over and to the north of San Francisco kept the sky there somewhat dark. As the light hit the shoreline area where I had gone, the foreground boats and buildings and so forth were lit by this lovely filtered light and set off against that darker sky. The conditions did not last long — soon the sun rose above that cloud gap and the light soon became gray and flat.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: light

Museum Windows, Shadows

Coastal Cliffs, Mist And Shadows

Winter Light and Cross Walks

South Beach Harbor, Morning

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