Photographer Doug Kaye prowling a San Francisco alley in late afternoon light
Back in early September I joined up with a group of fellow photographers to explore areas of downtown San Francisco in late afternoon light, followed by dinner, and then a return to the streets to photograph at night. Among the group was photographer Doug Kaye, here seen walking into the light along a narrow San Francisco street, a street lined with a bit of Dr. Seuss architecture with wildly dissonant angles from shadows, fire escape leaders, perspective convergence, and a crazily tilting lamp-post.
Later on this evening we headed back out after dark to photograph areas between roughly upper Chinatown and the Union Square vicinity. Night street photography is rapidly becoming a bit of a passion. Last year on a trip to Manhattan I realized that my little mirrorless camera performs well enough at high ISOs that I can effectively do handheld photography in the urban night environment — and this was a revelation!
Photographer Patricia Emerson Mitchell working the dawn light near a small lake in Long Valley
On about my third week of aspen photography this fall I was accompanied back to the Sierra by my wife and fellow photographer, Patricia Emerson Mitchell. There are all sorts of advantages for me when she comes along — motel (instead of tent or back of car), real food (instead of things heated over a camp stove), and more… ;-) By this point in the aspen season I was ready for something that wasn’t aspen, so on this morning we headed east rather than west into the Sierra, traveling out across Long Valley with a plan of going even further east toward the White Mountains near the town of Benton.
We started in near darkness and arrived at a familiar spot out in the Valley before the sun rose. We parked and headed out to our destination, arriving a few minutes before the light, at which point we went to work rapidly — the photographic opportunities evolve rapidly as the first light arrives. Here she sets up close to the shoreline of the lack, photographing across the water toward mountains to our north as the first light rakes across sagebrush and the nearby hills.
Two men wait on the sidewalk for the traffic light to change, San Francisco
Taking a brief break from the stream of photographs of eastern Sierra Nevada fall colors — I think I need to rest my eyes! — I’m next sharing a couple more San Francisco street photography images from early September of this year, when I joined a group of fellow photographers to wander about in some downtown areas. We started in the late afternoon, with the plan of shooting in the sunset and twilight and then continuing right on into the night. This photograph comes from a later hour, shortly before I wrapped up for the evening.
We eventually ended up in San Francisco’s Chinatown district. This is, of course, a popular tourist area during the daytime, but it has a different character in the evening as the shops close up. From here we wandered down to the Union Square area, where there are almost always crowds of shoppers, tourists, and people passing through. At about this point it was time for me to head back to where I started, so I left the group and started back toward my car, stopping occasionally to make a few more photographs. In a way, this photograph is a bit of a lie and a contrivance — though all photographs are such to some extent. Here, in a rather busy area, I spotted the two men along at a corner and by choosing my composition careful (and quickly, this being street photography!) I managed to exclude the rest of the bustling scene and place them against a sort of amorphous form of the back ground building and in front of the geometry of the cross walk.
First light on rugged, snow-dusted ridges above aspen-covered Parker Bench
This is a special place, high along the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada and open to the first dawn light from the east. It is also just far enough off the beaten track and difficult enough to access that it is usually not very crowded. (Don’t worry if you can’t get to it, there are thousands of other places where you can have a similar experience in the eastern Sierra.) We recently got up early enough to drive here and arrive well before sun rise. To this day, despite seeing many sunrises, I still often am surprised at how quickly the light comes and how silently. Living in a culture in which every spectacular thing, or thing that we are supposed to regard as being spectacular, is pumped up with loud music and lots of action, the sunrise comes often comes in complete silence and with little warning — you look up and notice that the light has already struck some small element of the scene, and soon you discover it moving across the landscape and quietly lighting more and more bits and pieces. I made this photograph when this first light had hit the rugged upper slopes above this aspen-covered bench, but before it had worked its way down to the trees.
This photograph also illustrates something I finally figured out about this strange eastern Sierra fall of 2015. This year the season began oddly, with very early first color in many places. In addition, many groves simply did not have leaves — either they lost them so early that I never saw them or perhaps they did not put out leaves this year. In other groves the leaves went almost straight “from green to gone,” with little or not brilliant color phase. Where this happened, I think it was the result of the four-year drought creating tremendous stress on the trees. At the same time, other climate factors thought by some to be associated with the drought also had the effect of delaying the color change of trees that were not as stressed by the shortage of water. Instead, these trees are changing later, likely due to overall warming temperatures. So far, this has been a season not quite like any other I’ve experienced. In this photograph you can spot examples of almost all of these conditions — completely bare groves, groves that have turned and already dropped leaves, some that are going straight from green to having no leaves, and even some trees that are still very green.
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.
