Tag Archives: mission

Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Parking Lot Near Pier 48, Morning

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Parking Lot Near Pier 48, Morning
Parking Lot Near Pier 48, Morning

Parking Lot Near Pier 48, Morning. San Francisco, California. July 8, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Morning light on a large parking lot near Pier 48, San Francisco.

Continuing with the “urban landscape” theme, this is a photograph of a parking lot south of the bridge next to ATT Park and near the buildings of Pier 48 in San Francisco. After getting off the train that arrived in San Francisco at 7:00 a.m. and wandering over to Townsend Street, I decided to cross the what I think must be the Mission Bay inlet and take a look through this area which was rather deserted at this early hour. (Come back here before a Giants game, and the parking lot will be completely full of the cars of people who are willing to spend exorbitant amounts to park here.)

While there were cars in other portions of this parking lot that are closer to likely destinations, at this far end there was a single lonely car, and that seemed like it could be an anchor for a photograph of the lot, the tall streetlight poles, the industrial-looking buildings of Pier 48 and other assorted waterfront things. Because it was so early, the sun rising across the bay was filling the air with brilliant light that created a sky that was more white than blue.

In addition to the obvious crop, this image required other kinds of substantial work in post. The first issue was controlling the very brightest parts of the sky and a second was the follow-up need to then lighten a few other areas to get some detail back into the image. Color balance was a tricky thing – this isn’t that far from what the raw file contained, though I did warm the colors just a bit. I also did something in this image that I rarely do, namely use semi-opaque blurred and desaturated overlay layer of the original image to do, well, some stuff that is a bit hard to describe in written form. Suffice it to say that this had an effect on the parking lot and on the brightness of the sky.

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.

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

Saint Patrick’s Church

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Saint Patrick's Church
Saint Patrick's Church

Saint Patrick’s Church. San Francisco, California. July 8,2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Black and white photograph of walls, windows, and roof lines of the side of Saint Patrick’s Church, San Francisco.

I don’t know the full history of this church in downtown San Francisco, but I do know that it is visually interesting. It has the appearance of an old cathedral, with the emphasis on old. Parts of the structure appear to be made of reinforced concrete, parts of brick, and a few sections of newer construction. Bits and pieces of all of that appear in this photograph, with some rather old and weathered materials in much of the structure, but with a much more modern-looking outbuilding at lower right.

While there is a large park (Yerba Buena Park) right across the street, much of the other surrounding architecture is quite modern for the most part. Most striking is the deep blue cubic structure of the Contemporary Jewish Museum right next door, but all around much taller and vastly more modern buildings are found. (Some of the light filling the shadows in this photograph is reflected from those buildings.)

I think that this photograph has a lot in common with a number of my photographs of mountains, especially the Sierra Nevada. In fact, I don’t think it is too hard to find parallels to some of the recent photographs of Mount Conness towering above the shorter Polly, Pywiack, and Medlicott Domes near Tenaya Lake along Tioga Pass Road.

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.

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

Red Tile and Door

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Red Tile and Door
Red Tile and Door

Red Tile and Door. Mission District, San Francisco, California. February 20, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A stripe of bright red tiles and dilapidated doors in San Franciso’s Mission District.

This photograph was made early in 2010, and is one that I dredged up from the “archives” during the year-end process of reviewing all of my thousands of 2010 raw files. I had been in San Francisco with some spare time and I found myself in the Mission. This area is a great resource for photography, so I set out on foot to look for subjects along the crowded streets of this neighborhood. A small girl behind the heavy screen door on the left (barely visible in this photograph) first caught my attention, but I also found the juxtaposition of horizontal and vertical lines interesting along with the very weathered and distressed doors and walls. The thin line of brilliant red tiles was striking against the dark and dingy background.

G Dan Mitchell Photography
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Photographs: Music & Musicians, Photographs: New York City, Photographs: People

Photographs from “Così fan tutte: Some Assembly Required”

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This is definitely not landscape photography.

One of the things on my agenda when we spent a week in New York City last month was photographing “Così fan tutte: Some Assembly Required,” an unusual event based on Mozart’s opera. Over the course of four evenings at the Gershwin Hotel in Manhattan, a group of singers and instrumentalists and others revealed much that might otherwise not be apparent the opera by “assembling” a portion of the opera each night. The outline of the event was that each evening would begin with an informal rehearsal of a section of the opera, interspersed with commentary from participants, and then conclude with a straight-through reading of the section that had been rehearsed. Beyond that, many of those participating also “took it online” during the event, tweeting and blogging as it took place. (My wife played principal oboe in the orchestra, and I have to tell you it was very strange to get text messages from her during the “show!”)

Photographing the event presented some interesting opportunities along with some challenges. The challenges were mostly what you might expect – concert venues, especially during a “rehearsal” are often not lit with photography in mind, and the space in the Gershwin Hotel where this took place was a virtual nightmare of photographic problems. The walls are bright red! The lighting was very low. There were columns in the middle of the orchestra. All in a day’s work, right? (I mostly shot natural light, and was very glad to have a 135mm f/2 lens and a Canon 5D2 which produces quite decent images at ISO 3200.) The opportunities, however, were worth the challenges. For one, unlike an actual performance at which the noise of a camera is simply unacceptable and, in addition, one needs to be virtually invisible, because this was an informal event I was not only able to shoot as the performance took place, but I was also able to wander around more or less at will. And while performers can often be quite skittish about being photographed during a performance – it creates an unwelcome distraction for them – these performers were very relaxed about it and even seemed to want to be photographed.

I exposed hundreds of frames during the two nights I was there, and I’m only now finding the time to sort through them. I will almost certainly not post all of the photographs here individually, as I would do with a lot of my other work, but (below the “jump”) I will collect many of them in this post. Note that this work is ongoing – I’m starting with an initial set of ten photographs, but others will be added as I update this post later. Continue reading Photographs from “Così fan tutte: Some Assembly Required” →