Tag Archives: reflection

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

Fallen Leaves

September 15, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Fallen leaves on a grate along a Seattle downtown sidewalk

August 14 was a day off during the Seattle Opera “Ring” cycle – a series of four Wagner operas performed over a six-day period. For those who may not know, attending a full production of the Ring is almost a full-time occupation for the better part of a week. This may sound unbelievable to those who cannot imagine such a thing, but the four operas range from as short as about 2 1/2 hours up to well beyond five hours for the last one, Götterdämmerung – and once you start to “get it” and buy into the whole story, the music, and everything that goes with a production of this thing, well you’ll understand. In any case, on this first of two free days we had during the performances we decided to keep it simple and just head to downtown Seattle to walk around and see what we could photograph.

We took a fairly free-form approach to the shoot, starting near Pike Place Market where we knew we could get some coffee and then photographing people and stuff in and around the Market. We finished there and headed south through downtown, with no particular goal in mind. Eventually we got as far as the Art Wolfe Gallery, where we looked around a bit before heading north again. These street shoots are a lot of fun. I often shoot quickly, using a small camera and almost always just a prime, and I forego the usual tripod and gobs of heavy equipment. Subjects can range from people to buildings to little bits and pieces of urban detritus, and they frequently appear and are gone quickly. Something about this conjunction of lines and textures caught my attention, along with the faintly mossy green tint and the bit of accidental nature in the form of the leaves that had fallen on the metal grate.

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: Austria, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Window Shadows and Reflections

August 19, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The shadows and faint reflections of a window create patterns on a wall in Salzburg, Austria

Although we did not actually stay in Salzburg during out July 2013 travels, we managed to end up there on four of our 7 days in Bavaria. Our trail from Heidelberg arrived in Salzburg and our return train departed here. On a couple of other days we were traveling around the area to visit various features not far from Salzburg, so we ended up there for a few hours – on two occasions having a late lunch, taking part in Salzburg’s “coffee culture,” and then wandering around. We did see some of the main tourist places, such as the square near the Salzburg Cathedral, the castle, and the narrow and bustling (and a bit uncomfortably commercial) streets of the old downtown, but we also managed to walk through a few less busy areas.

Some of these walks took us through some very narrow and old streets between the main part of old Salzburg and the outlying area where we parked. Here the buildings sit right up against the streets, and the streets themselves were obviously constructed in a pre-automobile era since they are barely a single car wide. Many things intrigued me about these narrow streets beside their mere narrowness: the various muted colors of the buildings, the ways the streets twist and turn and come together at odd angles, the interesting way that the light played on the scene as it came down from far above or shone down street that aligned with the sun, and some of the architectural features such as the windows and the interesting metal street lights that seemed to be everywhere. In this photograph the sun was rather high in the sky but almost in line with the street, and the image of the shadows of the open windows almost mirrors the fainter pattern of the reflections from the glass.

Photographs: Mono Lake Basin, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Mono Lake Sky

August 16, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Afternoon thunderstorms develop over the eastern Sierra Nevada and Mono Lake

I think that many people are initially drawn to Mono Lake by the famous and often photographed tufa tower formations, and I have certainly sought out and photographed that subject quite a few times. But the more I go there the less I’m interested primarily in the tufas, and the more I find myself drawn to and thinking about other things. These include the immense space and deep quite surrounding the lake, broken by the cries of birds, especially when you visit at the quietest time around dawn. I also am drawn to the sky above this lake – which is often, frankly, rather barren, but when filled with the right kind of clouds can almost be the subject itself.

But only almost, so in this photograph I decided to include a thin strip of the reflecting water of the lake along with the darker formation of Black Point and the hills rising beyond in order to anchor that sky to something solid. This was one of those afternoons when thunder storms were trying to develop, but couldn’t quite build sufficiently before sundown. But this still left some very spectacular clouds, especially where updrafts pushed their tops high into the light. I suppose that there are several reasons that I chose to make this a black and white photograph, but one very practical reason was that the lower reaches of the atmosphere were a bit brown from a nearby wildfire, and I could better adapt to that in monochrome.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Granite Towers, Storm Clouds

August 9, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Storm clouds begin to clear about granite towers and spires, Yosemite Valley, California

These towers stand close to Sentinel Rocks in Yosemite Valley. The day had started out very cloudy, with light rain on the Valley floor and snow flurries around the rim of the Valley. As the day wore on the rain mostly stopped and there were breaks in the clouds, although the atmosphere stayed a bit on the murky side overall. That “murkiness” was not very conducive to a color photograph so I felt that this was more likely to end up in monochrome, as indeed it did. Because the sun is slightly behind the large towers and because the atmosphere was not completely clear, the towers took on a sort of ominous quality.

On a winter day when clouds ring the Valley I could easily spend hours with a long lens pointed up toward the rim, isolating little vignettes of clouds and trees and rock. For a place whose landscape seems to be so familiar, this provides an ephemeral alternate landscape that forms and disappears in moments. When I’m in the Valley, give me clouds!

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: reflection

Fallen Leaves

Window Shadows and Reflections

Mono Lake Sky

Granite Towers, Storm Clouds

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