Tag Archives: pipes

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

Industrial Building, Mixed Lighting

May 4, 2014 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Numerous sources of artificial light illuminate an industrial building from outside and inside

I like night photography for a number of reasons. I enjoy the very slow work, finding subjects and compositions in near darkness and then waiting patiently for long exposures to complete. “Normal” photography can be a slow and meditative process, but night photography must be. Given so much time to stand and wait, I cannot help but notice the stillness and quiet of the night, and to feel the cool and damp air. In fact, as a person who does night photography, these things are almost as much part of the experience as the visual elements.

In the visual context, there are a few things about the appeal of night photography that might not occur to a person who has not done it. When photographing in very low light, what we photograph is often very different from what we actually see. Often the subject is quite dark, even when lit by the moon or nearby lights, but the camera doesn’t care—a long enough exposure can collect more light that our eyes can, and a dim and drab subject can become bright. Also, the illusion that the camera stops time is not quite so strong when photographing at night. Over the course of a many minutes long exposure stars move, lights of cars appear and pass, clouds blur into soft streaks, and the edges of shadows from moonlight blur. In industrial areas such as this one, the lighting is a mixture of things glowing from within and lit from without, and the diversity of lighting—tungsten, fluorescent, sodium vapor, LED, mercury vapor, moonlight—paints the nightscape with wild colors. This building is an excellent example. The upper windows emanate a glow from yellow interior light. Relatively colorless light hits the upper walls, but the light takes on an odd blue/pink tone on the lower building, and the shadows head toward blue.

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.

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

Shadow on Door 4

April 13, 2014 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

A night scene from the historic Mare Island Naval Ship Yard

This is another night photograph from the historic Mare Island Naval Shipyard near Vallejo, California. It is hard to explain what attracted me to this specific subject, though the photograph is one of a small series I shot of this wall and the white building. (A “series” of night photographs often comprises a small number of photographs, since it often takes many minutes to complete a single exposure.)

I began by photographing from a position far to the right, where there was a large puddle of reflecting water between my position and the two buildings, and then I worked my way around the scene to finally shoot it straight on. In addition to the water, I was intrigued by the color contrast between the salmon colored wall and the stark white shack in front of it. (Though, to be honest, in the near darkness I had to make some assumptions about what the colors might actually be!) This photograph contains a number of elements that are common at Mare Island, especially at night. The architecture itself is typical—mostly quite utilitarian, with many very large buildings that were constructed for ship-building industry. There are often exposed pipes and wires and other elements. It is common to see weathered paint and rust. Windows are everywhere, often comprising surprisingly extensive portions of the exterior walls. I’ve never asked anyone, but my assumption is that it was less expensive to “light” the interior naturally than to use artificial light to illuminate such large spaces. The photo also illustrates a much more modern feature. Not long ago, when I first photographed here, the lights were often quite colorful, including sodium vapor, tungsten, fluorescent, mercury, and more. This often produces wildly colorful images at night. But today, for energy efficiency reasons, neutral colored LED lighting is being installed everywhere, and the color balance is more like that of daylight.

Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Urban/Street

Pipes, Window, Stucco Wall, and Shadows

August 26, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Late winter shadows fall across a suburban scene composed of a stucco wall, pipes, and a window

This is the second of two “walking around” photographs made in my neighborhood while wandering around with a camera and a couple of lenses. These walks are exercises in seeing, in several ways: When I carry the camera I pay a lot more attention to things around me that I would otherwise simply not see at all, and the process of looking and seeing photographs in places that are so mundane that I might regularly walk past them helps “tune up” my seeing skills.

As I often do, on this walk I was paying a lot of attention to shadows falling across the walls of buildings. As I write in my last photo post, once I started noticing the shadows, which are everywhere in this area, I began to see the buildings differently. For example, here is a building that I might otherwise have simply thought of as a tan building. But now it is a building with branches “painted” over almost its entire surface. And in this one, the branch shadows converge on the mundane little collection of faucets and wires and what-not at the lower left, then spread and open up to surround the white window frame above and to the right.

Photographs: Pacific Northwest, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Brown Wall with Pipes and Worn Paper Figures, Fremont District

May 30, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Worn paper figures glued to a brown wall with pipes and conduit, Fremont District, Seattle Washington.

This was one of the first photographs I made on my early May visit to the Fremont district of Seattle with a group on a “Seattle Photowalk” between Fremont and the Gas Works Park. Although they were going to make an evening of it, I was only able to join them for about an hour – but it turned out to be a productive hour as I came back with nearly a dozen photographs that I like.

Once I got in the spirit of the place, I found the visual opportunities in Fremont to be quite interesting. There is a lot of the expected urban funkiness, with old buildings, small business crammed in odd corners, old structures, a waterfront, bridges overhead, and a few truly odd features such as the Lenin statue where the group met up. It is the sort of place I might initially look at and wonder what I’m going to shoot, only to discover ten minutes later that there almost more potential subjects than I know what to do with. This section of a brown wall was one of my first subjects. Initially the interesting pattern of crisscrossing conduit and pipes caught my attention, but when I looked closer I noticed the remnants of what might have been a small collection of paper figures glued to the wall.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: pipes

Industrial Building, Mixed Lighting

Shadow on Door 4

Pipes, Window, Stucco Wall, and Shadows

Brown Wall with Pipes and Worn Paper Figures, Fremont District

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