Tag Archives: photography

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

Chinatown Street

August 20, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A narrow, empty street curves past small shops in New York City’s Chinatown

First off, I’m obviously not a “real” New Yorker — I love the place, but I’m most certainly a visitor and a west coast guy at heart. However, that means that for me many things that might seem familiar and perhaps even ordinary to long time New Yorkers are still special and new. My first visit to New York’s Chinatown area was only a few years ago. We came into the city on Christmas Eve and pretty much the only restaurants open nearby (we were staying on Canal Street) were in Chinatown, so we plunged into the throngs that typically seem to crowd the sidewalks here, eventually wandered down some narrow streets, and arrived at a restaurant where we met up with friends and family members for a wonderful dinner.

This time we got there a bit later during our trip, on an evening when we were all perhaps becoming just a bit travel-tired and when we wanted a dinner that wasn’t quite so expensive as some others we had recently enjoyed. One or both of our sons suggested that we meet up at a place in Chinatown again, and since we arrived a bit early I took advantage of the situation and made a few photographs on this wonderful little street, with its beautiful curve, small shops, and wildly colorful store fronts and signs. Most of the time this street was busy with passing pedestrians, but I waited a bit and managed to make this photograph of the empty street in the evening light. The details of such photographs are often fun and intriguing — the picture on the hair salon sign at the left, the bicycle sitting on its rear wheel at the far right, the colorful flags on one store front, and more.

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.

Commentary, Ideas, Morning Musings

Print Review (Morning Musings for 8/19/14)

August 19, 2014 G Dan Mitchell 3 Comments

We are very fortunate to be part of a small group of photographers and friends who gather every six weeks or so in one of our homes for an informal print review. Each of the photographers is talented and expressive, and while our stylistic and subject preferences overlap, each has a unique style and photographic “voice.”

Print reviews, especially when the participants comprise a group of very talented and perceptive photographers who are also friends, are very, very useful. They tend to force me to switch out of the regular ongoing “flow” of making a lot of photographs, and towards a more directed task of choosing work worthy of showing and then making decent prints of the work. This switch is another element of the “discipline” component of photography. Even more important, I hear diverse responses to the work, which range from the purely emotional (very important) to technical observations (also important).

It is interesting to see the range of responses — sometimes they are pretty much what I expected based on my own relationship to the images, but at other times I’m surprised. I had two of those surprises last night, and each of them came in the case of sets of related prints that I shared. One was a small group of three street photographs from my recent visit to New York City, photographs of dense and busy spaces that feature intense and wild color palettes. I had originally preferred one of the images to the others, but was beginning to gravitate to a second one in the set that included many more people. To my surprise, the group responded most strongly to the third, and their reactions to it made me reconsider my own feelings about the images in several ways.

The second group of photographs included five high-key black and white photographs, all of which belong to minimalist thread in my work that is about luminous atmosphere, usually from fog, that is so brightly lit by sun that it almost hurts to look into the scene. In order to get prints to somehow suggest that quality, I push the luminosity levels up about as far as possible, and the resulting images are somewhat minimal and often contain large areas of gentle tonal gradation. Among the five I shared were four that I made in California’s Central Valley. One of these is truly minimal, with a nearly invisible and diffuse horizon dividing an extremely luminous foggy sky from its reflection in still water below, and the only clear details are a few scattered birds in the water. I had almost chosen to not include this print, thinking that it might just be too minimal for other viewers. Much to my surprise, and without any prodding from me, the group preferred this image over the others. Live and learn!

Finally, it is a wonderful and useful discipline to hear my work critiqued and mostly adopt a learner’s attitude about what I hear. It is in my nature to try to persuade others of my point of view, but that is usually (but not quite always) the least useful way to deal with critique. The best and most useful thing is to hear and understand what others are seeing in the work, and to a consider it even if it doesn’t mesh with my own perspective. In the end, I can choose to accept or not what I hear, but hearing it is incredibly useful and important.

If you are fortunate enough to have perceptive, knowledgable, sympathetic photographer friends, I urge you to try to get together and try this, and to stick with it long enough to allow the process and the relationships to grow. (And thanks to any of you in the group who are reading this!)

Morning Musings

Morning Musings (8/17/14)

August 17, 2014 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

If you don’t already follow The Online Photographer (or “TOP”), wander on over there and take a look. The slightly idiosyncratic blog often offers articles and commentary that provide interesting insights and which might make you look at things a bit differently. I read it regularly.

I’m mentioning TOP this morning because of something I saw there recently, a “something” that is directly related to this post, namely the TOP posts shared as “The Morning Coffee.” These are typically relatively short posts on a variety of subjects and at least giving the feeling of being somewhat informal posts written over a cup of coffee. Hey, I’m usually up early. I drink coffee. I like to write. Hence my own new “Morning Musings” series. We’ll see where it leads.

My “musing” for today relates to something from my recent trip to New York City. The brief story — likely to be expanded upon soon in other posts — is that I got to spend about a week wandering around Manhattan and Brooklyn with a camera. I had been thinking about doing some handheld night street photography for some time, and I had the opportunity on this trip. On one particular night, after emerging from a musical performance at a club, we headed off toward another performance in a nearby park. As we walked, hours after sunset, I pulled out my smaller “street” camera with a f/1.4 lens, raised ISO to 1600 or 3200 and started shooting. The ability to do this — shoot handheld in the middle of the night — was incredibly liberating. I’ve done a lot of tripod-based traditional night photography, but the technology of these newer cameras lets us shoot the night in an entirely different way, capturing quickly appearing subjects and conditions in ways that were essentially impossible only a few years ago. (Photos upcoming in the next week or two.)

Musing written. Coffee consumed. Now off to make some photographs…

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

Ship Yard Crane, Night Sky

April 27, 2014 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

A gigantic ship yard crane extends high into the night sky, Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, Vallejo, California

For many of us, these gigantic cranes, towering above the historic ship yard buildings and docks, are the iconic structures of the Mare Island Naval Ship Yard near Vallejo, California. The facility has been here since the 1800s, when it was the first naval ship yard on the west coast of the United States, and its history is quite remarkable. I won’t even begin to try to recount it here since a) it is so extensive and b) I’m far from an expert! In the 1990s it was decommissioned and since that time parts of the facility have fallen into ruin, others have been maintained in more or less their condition at that time, and some have been converted to other uses ranging from industrial to housing.

I have photographed here at night for about a decade. It used to be that these towering structures were mostly just parked in somewhat inaccessible locations behind fences along the waterfront. (The folks I photograph with here have a policy of not going into areas that are off-limits, and this had led to generally very good relations with the folks who oversee the place.) More recently the dry dock facility has been put back to use to dismantle very old ships from the “mothball fleet” that had been moored nearby, and now when I visit I often find the cranes have moved and may even be in more accessible locations. The first thing that struck me on this night’s visit was the effect of the security lights playing over the structure—and the fact that the lights are still the older and very colorful lights rather than the newer, more energy-efficient, and very boring LED lighting!

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: photography

Chinatown Street

Print Review (Morning Musings for 8/19/14)

Morning Musings (8/17/14)

Ship Yard Crane, Night Sky

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