Tag Archives: orange

Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: Night, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Structures and Objects

Yellow Building With Dark Windows, Star Trails

March 4, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Night photography of an old yellow building with dark windows against a backdrop of dark sky with star trails, Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, California.

This is probably a fairly conventional image of Mare Island buildings in some ways and it includes the ever popular star trails! One aspect of doing night photography – especially when exposures are measured in minutes rather than seconds, much less fractions of seconds, and double-especially when you must wait for a second dark-frame exposure to complete – is that you have a lot of time to stand around and observe and think about what you see. A whole lot of time. Before I made this photograph, I had made one of a nearby wall with some interesting windows and a door and illuminated by some light that passed through some intervening stuff, producing interesting shadows. The alley where I was shooting was quite dark, necessitating fairly long exposures, so as I made that previous photograph I had perhaps 10-15 minutes of “standing around time,” during which I was able to observe my surroundings pretty closely.

Lately one subject that I’ve been experimenting with is the upper stories of buildings, shot from below and with sky beyond. Near where I was shooting and next to a nearby alley was this large (apparently) concrete building with dark windows, and its pointed prow against a backdrop of relatively dark sky. I noticed that this section of sky held more bright stars that some other areas and that if I lined things up just right I could position some to either side of the point at the corner of the building.

More Night Photography

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Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: Night, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Textures, Photographs: Urban/Street

Brick Wall with Windows and Doors, Artificial Light

March 1, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A brick wall with windows and a door is illuminated by garish yellow artificial lighting at Mare Island Naval Ship Yard.

During the final weekend of February I was able to join my friends from The Nocturnes for an “alumni” shoot at the historic Mare Island Naval Ship Yard at Vallejo, California. I photograph at this location a few times every year – most often with The Nocturnes – and each time I go I find something new or else find a new way to photograph something familiar.

This wall is in a little side alley off or one of the main roads through the facility. Although it certainly doesn’t look like it in this photograph, this is a fairly dark area of the island where rows of large factory buildings (mostly abandoned) are lit, for the most part, by a few security lights. Standing there next to me as I made the photograph, this is not what you would have seen. At best, I could make out the shapes and arrangement of the windows and door, recognize that the wall was constructed of bricks, and notice that the light from nearby yellowish artificial lights was diffused and broken up by shining through intervening fences and other stuff.

But, for me at least, one of the goals of night photography is to see what cannot be seen with our own eyes. The whole idea of a “realism” in night photography seems almost crazy to me, at least when shooting such dark subjects as this one. “Reality” is an incredibly dark and dim and barely visible wall. What is more interesting to me is what the camera can see in the near dark. Here it reveals the intense yellow/orange color of the artificial lighting and the uneven patterns of light and shadow.

(It also occurred to me as I worked on this photograph that while I generally am somewhat conservative with color and saturation and all the rest in my photography of natural landscapes… the wild, garish, and intense color and light of this night photography may represent an opposite pole for me.)

More Night Photography

Photographs: Night, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Turnstile Shadows

February 17, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

Shadows cast by sodium vapor lamps shining on old turnstiles at Mare Island Naval Ship Yard.

This old row of abandoned turnstiles stands at the entrance to an alley through which we almost always walk as we begin shooting in the core area of the historic Mare Island Naval Ship Yard near Vallejo, California. It seems odd to see the structure here since now one can just walk around them, but I suspect that this area must have been somewhat secure at times since military ships were built here.

This isn’t an easy subject to photograph. Several of us were talking about how we have struggled to find a composition built around the turnstiles. I have one other photograph that I made a few years ago that I think works pretty well. In that one I aimed a bit higher and let the metal structure pretty much fill the frame, and I also ended up making it a black and white image. (It was used as a cover for a book at one point.) But on this evening a few of us were staring at the turnstiles again and remarking that there must be more photographs in there… somewhere… but that we are still trying to find them.

I thought it might be interesting to make the long and complex patterns of the shadows fill most of the frame, so I moved back just a little and pointed the camera down so that just a portion of the turnstile structure appears at the top of the frame. This also helps with a couple of technical challenges: the bright lights beyond the structure create a tremendously large dynamic range in the scene, and it can be difficult to keep some distracting background elements (like a stop sign!) out of the image. The garish yellow/orange light is from a large sodium vapor lamp that sits above the intersection on the road in the background. That coloration is part of what made me choose to make the previous photograph of this subject black and white, but on this night I decided to go with the color.

The final image is a blend of two exposures. The shorter one was selected to avoid blowing out the brightest areas in the upper part of the frame, and the longer one let me keep a bit more detail in the shadowed asphalt foreground.

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

Twilight Surf

January 12, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Many times the most interesting late-day light comes after the sun set, and I have learned to stick around as long as I can in these situations. The colors can become more intense as the details become softer, especially when the low light allows me to use longer exposure times with moving subjects in the very low light. By the time I made this photograph my exposure time was up to four seconds. (Shortly after this it was too dark to continue shooting – I could hardly see my camera any more!)

This image falls into my “minimalist seascape” category, without any particular central subject – though there are some points in the scene that do, I think, draw a bit more attention. There is a certain element of chance in these photographs since, obviously, I cannot control the waves. However, by watching their patterns and thinking about how their sharply defined shapes might form more diffused shapes over the longer exposures, I can make some reasonable guesses about when to trip the shutter release. Besides the sky, there are three things in the water portion of this scene that “worked” for me: the single darker wave just below the horizon, the row of three parallel waves in the middle of the frame, and the blurred and reflective area closest to the shore.

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” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him.

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