Tag Archives: red

Night Photography, Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: Night, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Five Night Photographs from Mare Island

November 5, 2013 G Dan Mitchell 5 Comments

I have so many photographs in the queue right now that I have decided to do something a bit different and post some of them in collections. This first group features night photography from the historic Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, a location where I have been doing night photography for about a decade now. As is often the case, this visit was with my friends from The Nocturnes, the San Francisco Bay Area night photography group.

A street light illuminates tracks running down Railroad Avenue at historic Mare Island Naval Ship Yard

This is probably one of the iconic views of the nighttime environment at Mare Island, as it was made in a location where many night photographers start, whether it is their first visit or their fiftieth time there. The spot is near the Mare Island Museum, which holds many objects and photographs from the long history of the place as the first important west coast naval ship yard. The tracks – obviously! – given this street its name. The tower is the chimney of the old power plant, and off in the distance more of the old ship yard buildings are visible.

Red light behind the door of an industrial building at the historic Mare Island Naval Ship Yard

I was interested in the windows, doorway, and wall of this building for several reasons on this visit. First – and night photographers will understand – Mare Island has recently started to see an update of its lighting. As newer and presumably more energy-efficient types of lighting become available, the older lighting gets replaced. Some years ago the move was to the intensely yellow sodium vapor lights (which you can see in other images in this set), but today it is to what I understand are LED systems. Since the ambient light is tremendously important to night photographers, we notice that this produces a significant change in the mood of photographs made here since the LED light seems to have a much more subtle coloration that is closer to what we might regard as daylight. The new lighting has been installed by this building, so I wanted to see how I could use it to make a photograph that still captured the feeling of the night. In addition, I noticed some subtle red interior lights behind the doorway that seem to suggest something a bit mysterious in this scene.

A green tinted shadow falls across the front of a yellow building, Mare Island Naval Ship Yard

There are several things I like about this photograph of the side of a tall building and a lower section casting an odd green shadow. In much night photography we create photographs of things that we actually cannot see – essentially we are making photographs of what the camera sees. Standing in front of this scene it was very, very dark and the details of the building wall was barely visible at all. However, after shooting this stuff for some time I can recognize what might happen with an exposure long enough to make this scene visible. The old sodium vapor lamps are still installed along this street, and I knew that their yellow light would have a powerful effect on the colors of the scene. I also know that where there is a shadow that is not illuminated by sodium vapor light, the shadow will take on the colors of other kinds of ambient lighting – in this case a relatively green type of light coming from a nearby open area. In the end, without actually doing any light painting (the process of using colored lights and gels to illuminate the subject) I was able to make a photograph that is “naturally” just as wildly colorful.

Metal wall with white doors, window, and Reserved Parking sign

The plain and simple geometry of this building and its front wall has attracted me for several years, with its vertical lines, square forms of the door and the shadows, and the surprising orange highlights – and I have photographed it before. This building is now also lit by the newer lighting, so I had to see what I could do with this new coloration. I made two photographs of it. This one is a simple, straight-on view that is “about” the angular and square forms and the thin lines of orange paint and asphalt, with the only curves coming from the shadows in the window and a bit of broken-off pipe near the bottom center.

White door on a metal building with industrial structures of Mare Island Naval Ship Yard in the distance

This is a different take on the same wall, here composed off-center so that some of the darker ship yard machinery and structures can be seen.

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

Detail, Pearl District Building

August 21, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Detail of a section of a Pearl District building with painted walls and bricks, Portland, Oregon

I grabbed this photograph while walking through an area of what seems to me like it might be called the outer Pearl District. (True Portlandians could no doubt narrow it down more specifically.) This is a very pleasant area of more-or-less downtown Portland that seems to gentrifying – with some elements left from an older era and many things seeming to be updated and changed.

This building is on a street with a number of older buildings – with enough bricks to make this earthquake-country person just a bit nervous. Aside from that, a lot of the buildings seem familiar to someone from the San Francisco Bay Area. As we walked past, several things grabbed my attention for no particular reason: the combination of red/brown and shades of green, the horizontal pipe interrupting the rough and painted over surface of the brick foundation, and the somewhat geometric quality of the composition.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Maple Leaves and Sandstone

July 13, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Fallen autumn maple leaves lie on pink sandstone slabs in the high country of Zion National Park

Wind is not usually the photographer’s friend, at least when the photographer is shooting natural subjects that include foliage. Later on this trip we were stymied by strong winds when shooting in the Escalante River Canyon, as the trees and leaves were being whipped around in the gale. But the same winds that create these problems – and I was experiencing some of them with tree photographs on this day, too – also bring down the autumn leaves and in the right conditions can create a thick carpet of the wild fall colors.

This photograph, like quite a few I have shared recently, was made in the bottom of a wash where leaves tend to collect, but by means of water flow and, as here, due to the wind. These maple leaves ranged in color from yellow-gold through orange to almost red, and here they littered the rocks in the bottom of the channel. Like spring flowers, these colors are a fleeting thing, and the leaves on the ground quickly blow away or turn brittle and brown.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Autumn Color, Canyon Walls

July 8, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Autumn color foliage marches up the lower slopes of Zion Canyon, Utah

I was in Zion three times during October this year – it is a long story how that happened! On the final occasion, we were passing through the area on our way back to California at the very end of the month, having stayed the night before in Kanab and having a plan to stage the next day’s long return drive from St. George, Utah. The drive between those Kanab and St. George is not all that long, so we figured we would see what Zion might offer up as we passed through. Since we had photographed the high country along the Mount Carmel Highway earlier in the month, and since the fall color was rumored to be starting in Zion Canyon, we decided to head there in the morning. (In the end, we finished up here a bit sooner than we might have, so we ended up driving well past St. George, but that’s a different story…)

The height of the Zion Canyon color typically comes a bit later than this, so we figured that we might not see the very best color – but Zion is sort of like Yosemite in that there is something to see no matter what. After many days of shooting, this was one of those days when energy was at a bit of a low ebb. We started out in the upper end of the canyon, where we found some colorful red maples, but I don’t think any of use were necessarily quite “seeing it” at this point. So we moved down that canyon a bit, looking for whatever might turn up, and hoping for a bit more color that we were seeing. One of the last places we stopped to shoot was in this area from which features such as the Great White Throne and The Organ are visible. Here we were a bit more inspired, since there was a variety of things to see: the Virgin River, the flats along the river in the bottom of the canyon, a decent amount of developing fall color, towering rock walls, and evolving light. As I poked around along the river bottom I saw that some very colorful trees were visible up high along the base of the steepest cliff walls.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: red

Five Night Photographs from Mare Island

Detail, Pearl District Building

Maple Leaves and Sandstone

Autumn Color, Canyon Walls

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