Tag Archives: linear

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Southern California

Ridges and Shadows

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Ridges and Shadows
Morning light creates stark contrasts between ridges and shadows on Death Valley badlands landscape.

Ridges and Shadows. © Copyright 2022 G Dan Mitchell.

Morning light creates stark contrasts between ridges and shadows on Death Valley badlands landscape.

Believe it or not, I’m still not quite done with this year’s Death Valley photographs. I’ve been sitting on this one for a week or two, pondering several things about it, but now I think I’m done with it. It may be the final one from this year’s very productive visits to the park. We’ll see! (Looking ahead, there’s a good chance that a year from now I’ll review the files and find at least one more.)

This is perhaps the place to again mention the typical cycle I go through when I return with photographs from a location. I open up the collection, and a few typically jump out at me immediately. These will not necessarily be “the best” of the group, but they are photographs that are fairly straightforward to process and work more or less as I expected when I exposed them. Then I go back through the files and begin to work on likely prospects that will require more thought. (Often the best work comes from this pass.) But this isn’t the end of it, and next I look again, this time trying to see the work with a different perspective. Here I often “discover” how to “see” photographs that did not initially seem like they would work. Finally (or maybe not?) I make one more serious traverse of the work to see what I might have missed. And with that — at least until I come back to the files in a year or so — it is on to new projects!

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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

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Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: Pacific Northwest, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Blue Shirt Pedestrians, Linear Landscape

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Blue Shirt Pedestrians, Linear Landscape
Blue Shirt Pedestrians, Linear Landscape

Blue Shirt Pedestrians, Linear Landscape. Seattle, Washington. August 14, 2013. © Copyright 2013 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Two pedestrians in blue shirts walk past architecture emphasizing vertical and horizontal lines

A photograph like this is a bit hard to explain, but I’ll try. At least a little bit. As is often the case, for some reason this structure – a parking lot – caught my attention. I like the texture of concrete when doing city photography, and this landscape of lines seemed a bit striking, and in fact it got me thinking again about the very linear nature of much of the urban environment. Aside from a few things – the green tree, the red card, and the people – essentially everything in this scene can be regarded as being a sum of horizontals and verticals, from the obvious vertical covering of the garage to the wires, to the street lanes and lane lines, to the sidewalk, and the rows of squares on the background building.

It occurs to me from time to time that there is something very unnatural about this, and it might even be a cause of the disconnect from the environment that can occur in such places. But as (pretty much) always, the constructed world is not perfectly linear. But still, to me, the two people walking along the sidewalk, whose blue attire also caught my attention, look very small and very passive relative to the constructed world they inhabit.

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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