Rusty hinge on an old wooden garage door in the Mission District, San Francisco, California.
Finally, I think that this may really be the fine image in this series! The garage door with its weathered paint and rusty fixtures is in a small back alley in the Mission District of San Francisco, California.
This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
Night photography of a moonlit stairway, wall, and window at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, Vallejo, California.
Compared to most of my night photography, especially the work from Mare Island, this photograph has, I think, more of a noir quality. This photograph was made in extremely dark conditions at the bottom of a dark stairway next to a dark building in a dark corner of the historic Mare Island Naval Shipyard using only moonlight. Oh, did I mention that it was very dark? :-)
Making this a bit more of a technical challenge, in order to get the composition I had in mind (more or less, since it was impossible to really see the scene fully) I needed to shoot from a position very close to the bottom of the stairway and close to the window at lower right. Since I didn’t want to lose sharpness on the far section of the wall that is lit by moonlight I had to use a small aperture of f/16. But in order to maintain image quality I didn’t want to raise the ISO too far.Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place! So the exposure ended up being very close to eleven minutes long, and even this was barely long enough. (And, using the camera’s long-exposure noise reduction, this meant waiting around for well over 20 minutes to expose the shot and then do the follow-up dark frame exposure. For obvious reasons, I only made one shot of this subject!)
This is going to be a challenging photograph to print! I think that it really needs to go all the way to black in portions of the lower left, but I’ll need to keep at least a small amount of near-black detail – and I’ll have to do a bit of work to figure out how to best print to get the right color/detail in the shadow at the upper right.
This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
Old and dilapidated garage doors and “no parking” sign in afternoon light on Virgil Street, San Francisco, California.
This seems like a photograph that most people would not identify with San Francisco. If anything, it first appears to be some sort of rural image, perhaps a rustic old barn on a ranch or similar. However, this shot was made along a narrow alley in the Mission District of San Francisco. (Again, as in the “yellow building” photo I posted recently, I suppose I could be accused of attempting to make the Mission not look like the Mission!)
The light was changeable and from time to time beautiful on this afternoon. While it was a cloudy day and mostly somewhat gray, the clouds were thin and broken enough that occasionally soft and diffused light would break through. Here that light brings a bit of relief to the complex and rich textures of this very old and very run-down garage wall and door – and that little bit of green at the lower left softens the whole thing just a bit.
This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
Columns, wall, and walkway on a rainy day at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, California.
I have photographed this spot before, and it is a bit strange that I shoot it regularly when I visit the Getty. It is not exactly a prominent location at the Center – it is at the bottom of the stairs near the entrance to the cafe. I’m sure most people would just walk right past it, and I wouldn’t blame them given all of the obviously spectacular settings at the Center. However, I’m attracted to the three light colored poles, the reflective floor (especially in light rain), the angles of the walkway, and the way the far wall is lit.
This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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