Tag Archives: people

Looking In

Looking In - Almost everyone in a group of people looks into a conservatory courtyard while waiting for it to open.
Almost everyone in a group of people looks into a conservatory courtyard while waiting for it to open.

Looking In. San Francisco, California. August 4, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Almost everyone in a group of people looks into a conservatory courtyard while waiting for it to open.

Apologies for this title, but I did not get the name of the building (perhaps today I’ll do that), “A group of people looking into a courtyard with one guy looking the other way” seemed a bit too long, and I ran out of creativity before posting. I suppose there is the potential here for incorporating some quip about San Francisco “summer” weather as well – on this lovely “summer” afternoon there were high clouds and fog and it was trying to rain! :-)

I had another afternoon to kill wandering around San Francisco yesterday afternoon. My general target was something like street photography, though it also incorporated this little project I have to photograph downtown buildings from odd angles and render the images in black and white. I had been working on the latter and was heading back to where I would have dinner (and running a few minutes late) when I saw this little cluster of people crowded around what looked like the entrance to this glassed in courtyard filled with palm trees and some tables. Any sort of odd little scene like this – quite different from the general rush of people in the downtown area – catches my eye and often seems like it might make a photograph. Here I had the group of people crowded together to work with, along with the classical architecture of the building and courtyard. So I did what I often might do with such a scene: I stopped and quickly made one initial photograph so as not to miss it entirely, and then I remained and watched for something interesting or out-of-place to occur. When the fellow at the right separated himself from the larger group, my first reaction was a bit of frustration that he had broken up the group of people facing away, but in the end he makes the photograph more interesting to me than it would have been otherwise.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer 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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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.

Now Open

San Francisco Photograph - An abandoned toilet stands next to a Chase Bank "Now Open" sign in the Chinatown district of San Francisco.
An abandoned toilet stands next to a Chase Bank “Now Open” sign in the Chinatown district of San Francisco.

Now Open. San Francisco, California. July 15 2011. © Copyright 2011 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

An abandoned toilet stands next to a Chase Bank “Now Open” sign in the Chinatown district of San Francisco.

Sometimes the world just hands you things that you couldn’t come up with on your own if you tried.

The opportunities for bad puns are so tempting here, but I’ll struggle to resist, and instead simply offer a few words about the location and the, uh, scene. On this summer day I was wandering around San Francisco to do street photography, and walked up Grant Street. Grant is such a tourist place that I often instead head off to some nearby streets that are a bit less geared to the tourist trade, so I picked up a cross street and wandered up toward Stockton Street. At one point as I walked past a busy area of markets and other small businesses I happened to notice this odd (and perhaps unfortunate, if you are the bank) juxtaposition of sidewalk “decorations.”

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer 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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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.

Arthur Tress, De Young Museum

Arthur Tress, De Young Museum - Arthur Tress discusses his photographs with a group of photographers at his exhibit at the De Young Museum, San Francisco.
Arthur Tress discusses his photographs with a group of photographers at his exhibit at the De Young Museum, San Francisco.

Arthur Tress, De Young Museum. San Francisco, California. March 9, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Arthur Tress discusses his photographs with a group of photographers at his exhibit at the De Young Museum, San Francisco.

Back in early March, Adobe invited a number of San Francisco Bay Area photographers to meet with photographer Arthur Tress at his show at the De Young Museum, “San Francisco 1964.” (Thanks, Adobe!) After we assembled in the lobby and had a moment or two to speak to some of Adobe folks, including some working on the just-released new version of Lightroom, we adjourned to the gallery. In this photograph, the group listens to Tress (barely visible at the far side of the taller) as he walks through the gallery and talks about his work.

Tress and a photography curator introduced us to the show and shared some back-story and perspectives on the work it includes. The photographs are all black and white images shot in medium format during a period when Tress first came to the west coast in 1964, a year when a lot of interesting stuff was happening in The City – including the first US concerts by the Beatles, the “Goldwater” Republican convention, civil rights demonstrations, and more. Tress’s photographs are interesting on several levels: as a record of aspects of the period that we might not realize we have lost (especially to this photographer who was a child living in the Bay Area at that time), as a record of actual events, and as an often-witty commentary on much of what he observed.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | FacebookGoogle+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email

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.

Petroglyphs

Petroglyphs - Petroglyphs on a rock face overlooking desert terrain
Petroglyphs on a rock face overlooking desert terrain

Petroglyphs. Death Valley National Park, California. January 5, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Petroglyphs on a rock face overlooking desert terrain.

Encountering these very old and very mysterious traces of people who lived in this desert terrain many, many years ago is always a special experience. Perhaps you have read the following story here before, but I think of it every time I encounter these things. Well over a decade ago I was camped in a place in Death Valley National Park that lies somewhere between popular and the anonymous wild spaces far out in the back areas of the park. I was with a group of other people. In the morning I wandered away from the place where we were camped. I crossed a wash and walked up onto the base of a great alluvial fan, found a suitable “sitting rock,” and just sat there for a while taking in the immense space and silence. I happened to look down at the rocky ground and I an oddly shaped rock caught my attention. I’m no expert on these things, but it seemed completely clear to me that this rock had been shaped by human hands. (I later came to understand that it was probably a “knife,” perhaps one designed for scraping.)

At the moment I saw and then picked up and held this rock, the place was transformed from a semi-wilderness of rock and scattered plants into a very different sort of thing – a place that had been the home of people, many years before I sat there on my rock. My thoughts turned from the landscape around me to try to imagine the person who had created and held this rock – who was this person? what was it like to live in such a place in such a time? what had happened to them? I returned the rock to the desert floor and walked back to my camp.

The petroglyphs in the photograph are located in another place in the park, and I have visited and photographed them more than once. These are perhaps the most precious and among the most fragile things in this desert, which is why I never write about the specifics of their locations. (I also have photographs of petroglyphs that have been defiled by thoughtless morons.) If you know where these are, let’s keep it to ourselves, OK?

The first time I photographed these examples of rock art, I simply shot them straight on so that the shapes were as clear and large as possible. Since then I had been thinking of trying to photograph them in a way that might reveal them in the context of the larger surroundings – perhaps as the person or people who made them might have seen the place.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | FacebookGoogle+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email

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.