Tag Archives: monochrome

Photographs: Chicago, Photographs: Urban/Street

Chicago L Train

November 1, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A Chicago L train crosses a downtown bridge.

Since I’m not a Chicago regular, much less a Chicago native, I get to report the obvious here — these things are all new to a visitor who is still discovering the town. Actually, I was already familiar with the Chicago L, the city’s elevated railway system, from my previous short visits. The L trains, many of which have a bit of the same attractive worn and dated quality of the New York subway system cars, travel on elevated tracks above the downtown area. The car in this photograph is on a bridge crossing the Chicago River in the downtown area.

I don’t know the whole story, though I think it involves the historic paths of railroads into the downtown area, but there are areas in downtown Chicago with multiple street levels. For example, if you drop down to some sections of the Riverwalk from the main roadway level, you arrive at another system of roadways that runs underneath. Add the L on top of that, and there are three transpiration layers in places.

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Photographs: Chicago, Photographs: Urban/Street

East Madison Street

October 18, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Afternoon light on East Madison Street, Chicago

We had been in roughly the Millennium Park area for a good part of this day, wandering around and looking at stuff and visiting a museum, and we were (if I recall correctly) heading back toward our hotel in the late afternoon, planning to perhaps take a break before figuring out where to go for Chicago style pizza. (One goal on this trip was to have both Chicago and New York pizza. After all, pizza research is a solemn duty.)

I’ve noted elsewhere that Chicago’s tendency to combine tall downtown buildings with more open space allows a lot of beautiful light to reach down to ground level and it sometimes permits clearer views up and down streets. As we walked past this intersection, marking the end of East Madison, the late light was coming straight up the street from the west, though slightly hazy and soft atmosphere, striking the sides of buildings and silhouetting people and vehicles on the street. This was light to stop for!

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Canyon, Haze

October 13, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Afternoon haze fills the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne River

Westward flowing rivers, descending through deep canyons toward California’s Great Central Valley, are a major feature of the Sierra Nevada. Although one major river, the Kern, heads south and many smaller creeks take a short route down the eastern escarpment of the range, the gradual slope from the west means that the west side rivers often drain huge areas of the range and, though a combination of ancient glaciation and continuing river erosion, have cut many impressive canyons. Some are popular and frequently visited, such as Yosemite Valley and to a lesser extent Kings Canyon, but most of the others are not as well known.

On a hazy late afternoon I climbed the spine of some low granite ridges above the lake where we were camped and found myself looking directly down the course of the Tuolumne River as it makes its way through a deep and twisting canyon toward… sadly, the Hetch Hetchy reservoir. Fortunately, that abomination is not visible from this point, and instead the view is of a series of overlapping and receding ridges dropping to the bottom of the huge and remote canyon.

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

Man With Bag

September 12, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A man carrying a bag hurries across a Manhattan street

This photograph happened so fast that I can’t even recall exactly where I was, though I suspect I was somewhere a few blocks below the southeast corner of Central Park, where I was headed with a plan of walking around the entire park and photographing what I saw.

One thing I’ll say about busy urban environments such as that in Manhattan — there is bound to be something or someone interesting in front of your camera very quickly. Once you begin to be able to sort out the subjects from the visual background noise, they can start to appear so rapidly at times that there is barely time to photograph them. Many of them suddenly appear and it is a matter of shoot now or lose it. (That happens occasionally in my more typical sorts of photography, but it is rarely so continuous as it is here.) I’m betting that I might have seen this intense-looking fellow before he started to cross the street, and I believe he was in such a hurry that he moved back behind the cars stuck in traffic to cross between them. Aside from photographing him, we had no interaction and he was gone as quickly as he appeared.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: monochrome

Chicago L Train

East Madison Street

Canyon, Haze

Man With Bag

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