Tag Archives: photography

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Night, Photographs: Urban/Street

Buddha Bodai One

January 23, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

People assemble outside of Buddha Bodai One on Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve in New York City, and after joining the throngs up on Fifth Avenue we headed down to China Town for dinner, planning to eat at a place that we’ve gone to in the past. We arrived and it was surprisingly crowded and when I asked I was told that the wait would be “an hour and a half or longer!” Hey, the food is good… but not that good, so we set out to find an alternative. We wandered the area a bit, figured out that just about everything on Mott Street was similarly crowded, and then headed off to a different street where we found a quieter Vietnamese place.

While wandering Mott Street to look for an alternative I kept the camera out and made a series of photographs of scenes along this street. It was a great spot to photograph, with lots of people who were often somewhat static in front of businesses and restaurants, and streets so narrow that signs from lights tended to fill in the shadows across the street. For me the elements of a photograph in a place like this include the light itself, whether flowing across sidewalks and into the streets or the light of the business signs; lots of color; and people assembling themselves into interesting arrangements. Here many of the individuals in the group are doing interesting things — a woman pushes a child in a stroller (which, for some reason, is starting to be a motive in my street photography), another woman seems to be slightly off-balance, a couple is in a darker area off to the right, and an older man stands along in front of a stairway, looking alone and slightly uncomfortable.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

Manhattan Sidewalk Scene

January 7, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Pedestrians on a Manhattan sidewalk on a cloudy winter morning.

This is one of those street photographs that I probably can’t fully explain to viewers. I’ll try, but it simply may or may not work for you — and it certainly is, at least superficially, not much like my landscape photography. Or is it? When I’m out and about in an urban area, sometimes I start to look beyond the general hubbub of the scene and I began to spot elements that I find fascinating: a particular person, a relationship of colors, light in unexpected places, juxtapositions of people doing things that may be related or unrelated, and transitory moments that are gone as quickly as they appear.

When I’m in this mode of seeing I often stop and watch the scene, waiting for something to happen. I don’t know in advance quite what it will be, but I know that the potential is there. (This, in fact, is one similarity to photographing the natural world, where more things than you might imagine are the result of simply being there at the right time and watching.) Here something about the front of this building caught my attention, and there was a steady stream of people passing by. (Of course there was — this is Manhattan!) At the moment of this exposure a bunch of things happened — somehow there are two strollers in the scene. Several people are engrossed by their smartphones. The woman at the far right is in a surprising and somewhat contorted position, and everything seems to have stopped in some sort of tableau.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Night, Photographs: Urban/Street

8 AV and Jane St

January 6, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A winter evening at the corner of 8th Avenue and Jane Street, Manhattan

Continuing my photographic bipolar swings between the natural world and the human world, here is another street photograph. It ties in with a couple of things that I’ve been thinking about recently in my street photography. First, it is an example of night street photography, shot handheld in near darkness using a small camera and high ISO. A year and a half ago I suddenly realized that this kind of photography had become a realistic possibility with the newer high ISO cameras. As a person who has long done long-exposure night photography from the tripod, this was truly a revelation. Secondly, I’m crazy about photographing lighted buildings, stores, restaurants and the light that spills from them onto the sidewalk, street, and anyone who happens to be passing by.

Aside from the general way that I’m always on the lookout for such things, this photograph was almost an accident. We had spent the afternoon at the new Whitney Museum. Those who know me have come to understand my predilection for spending way too much time going way too slowly through museums, and those people eventually give up and move on to other things, leaving me to continue ambling past the art. On this visit some of the people I was with had more or less “done” the Whitney in about and hour and a half — at which point I had more or less finished one floor of the place! We decided that they would all go ahead and find a place to eat and drink, and they ended up at a little tavern across the street from this photograph. I showed up hours later and joined them for food and beer, and we finally left the place after dark. As soon as I walked outside I saw this building across the street.

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

Green and Blue Wall

January 1, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Graffiti and poster remnants on a green and blue Brooklyn brick wall.

We arrived in New York late the day before, in time to check in to lodgings and meet our “kids” (two sons and their fiances) for dinner, but there wasn’t a lot of time to get around and see and photograph. The next morning we met up with our youngest son in the more or less the Williamsburg area, and we wandered about, hitting the waterfront of the East River and then finding lunch.

During any bit of urban wandering I’m almost always on the lookout for photographs. Photographing on the street is an exercise in working quickly and being versatile. In most cases I don’t have a specific subject in mind — the closest to that may be a general idea of looking a buildings or people or water or interiors or… In this case I was in an area with a lot of older construction, and we passed through a few spots that were obviously the hope to lots of posters and graffiti. Oddly, since people are sometimes trying to paint out the tagging, there can be many layers of often new paint, posters in various states of decay, and odds and ends of painted words and images. Here the remnants of a poster partially obscured a hand drawn heart on a wall that appeared to have been painted in two not quite identical shades of blue-green.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: photography

Buddha Bodai One

Manhattan Sidewalk Scene

8 AV and Jane St

Green and Blue Wall

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