Tag Archives: play

Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Structures and Objects

Inside The Oculus

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Inside The Oculus
Play of midday light and shadows on the walls of the Oculus, SFMOMA

Inside The Oculus. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. July 13, 2017. © Copyright 2017 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Play of midday light and shadows on the walls of the Oculus, SFMOMA

This week we made a visit to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) to see and hear the Soundtracks exhibit, which presents objects and installations of sonic art of various sorts. To be honest, I wasn’t that hopeful about this exhibit — I’ve often found that many visual artist’s ideas about sound art can be naive and banal in too many cases. However, the exhibit was (is, and you should go) excellent, with a wide variety of work that is interesting in a range of ways.

In any case, virtually every visit to this museum is also an excuse to make at least a few photographs, often of the architecture of the place. The central “Oculus” structure (which housed one of the sonic art pieces, too) is interesting to me as much for the play of light and shadows on its curved walls as it is for its own architectural form. I have photographed it many times, but being so close to the summer solstice the shadows took on different qualities than I had seen before. Here shadows from the structure of the upper window fall across a curved wall that is perforated by a pattern of large holes.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
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Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

New York Street, Child with Toy Car

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New York Street, Child with Toy Car
New York Street, Child with Toy Car

New York Street, Child with Toy Car. New York City. August 5, 2014. © Copyright 2014 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A child playing with a toy car on the sidewalk of a busy Manhattan street

I made this photograph on my first real day of shooting in Manhattan. We had arrived the night before, late enough that we only had time to take a cab to where we were staying, have a bite to eat (thanks, Timothy and Margaret!), and fall asleep. The next morning we went over to NYU, where Patty was participating in a music conference for the next five days, and after she got registered I was on my own in Manhattan, and on the prowl with a camera for a good part of the next few days. I often started out with very general plans, but then mostly sort of followed my intuitions as I wandered up and down the island. On this first morning I simply headed uptown toward Grand Central Station with my camera at my side, and began to get in the flow of photographing this busy, dense, and compelling place.

When shooting street I often think a bit like the landscape photographer than I am. This means that I find what I think is a visually interesting place, consider how to compose a shot, and then wait until something or someone interesting enters the frame. However, this shot worked more or less the opposite way. I saw this child, incongruously pushing his combination play car and stroller on a section of this very busy urban sidewalk. Fearing that it might be more than a little creepy to walk up and point my camera at this interesting child, I moved closer to the building wall so that I could instead include him near the edge of a shot of the overall street scene. Placing him so close to the lower left corner obviously made for an unusual composition, though I think it is somehow interesting to see him in a position that seems so peripheral to the rest of the scene. I watched to see if he would do anything interesting, and I made the exposure when he leaned over and looked in my direction. Initially I thought that the photograph might be in color, and as I worked with it the bright colors of taxis seemed to complement the cooler tones of the shaded sidewalk area. But there were problems — that interesting yellow also distracted from the child, and his little “car” was a dark shade of blue. In the end, I had a lot more control over the relative tonality of different parts of the scene with this black and white conversion.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist 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.