Tag Archives: reflections

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

Shop Windows

May 10, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Shop windows and posters along a narrow street in Heidelberg, Germany

During our 2013 visit to Germany we spent a total of about a week in Heidelberg, a city that seems to combine modernity with the old. From what we saw, the main evidence of “the old” is, literally, the old town of Heidelberg. While it is a tourist area, it is also the site of a lot of very old buildings lining narrow streets. We stayed with relatives, and were close enough that a short walk took us over a hill and across the Neckar River to the old section of the town.

I’m not sure I can explain what attracted me to this little building, crowded among other shops along a very narrow street that is mostly used as a walkway. Perhaps there is some unusual combination (as least from the perspective of my American experience) combination of orderliness and a slight edginess, but in a building that is not particularly modern. I decided to crop the image of the front of the shop closely, eliminating much of any context aside from the bit of slightly mossy sidewalk at the bottom of the frame. Everything seems very square and geometrical, though slightly aged and a bit off kilter. Although the windows are filled with posters, perhaps suggesting something of this university town, I notice that the posters are very carefully squared and centered in the windows, and even the clutter inside the building seems organized somehow.

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Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Curving Branch, Rippled Water

March 10, 2015 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

A curved branch extends above the rippled surface of a wetland pond reflecting morning sunlight and thinning clouds

This is a very simple photograph — though maybe not quite as simple as it seems — but one that needed a very specific set of conditions. The more I look at the shape of the branch the more the boundary between the actual branch and its reflection blurs, and the more similarities I see between the twisting shapes of the branch itself and the warped version of the twisting form seen in the reflection. I also like the way that its rough and mostly black shape contrasts with the soft curves and colors of the water.

The water is very shallow, part of a seasonally flooded wetland area in the Central Valley. Much of the flooded wetland is full of plants and grasses and other distractions, but here I found a single standing branch against a fairly large background uninterrupted by other branches or plants. The water was relatively still on this morning, though later the wind rose and broke up these smooth ripples. The morning tule fog had almost completely dissipated, leaving the sky a soft blue color interspersed with a few scattered clouds — and those colors and patterns are abstracted here in the surface of the water.

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

Lake, Rocky Shoreline

October 6, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Morning light and reflections of the rocky shoreline of a subalpine lake surrounded by forest, Yosemite National Park

At first glance a subalpine lake may look much like many other subalpine lakes. And, in fact, these lakes do tend to share some of the same sorts of features if they are in the same terrain and at the same elevation. Along the shoreline trees may march right down to the water’s edge, boulders may interrupt the shoreline and extend into the lake, there may be islands, it is often flat and marshy near the outlet stream, and higher slopes will often rise above the lake.

However, spend time at any such lake and it inevitably begins to reveal its own unique personality. Spend a lot of time at one lake — a period of at least a few days — and things that you overlooked at first become more obvious and may even come to be part of what defines the lake’s character. As soon as we arrived at this lake we all gravitated to the west shore in the early morning, from which we could photograph back across the lake and into the morning light, letting it fringe nearer trees against the backdrop of the shadowed trees on the other side. But further exploration — otherwise known as “wandering slowly around the lake many times” — began to reveal all sorts of possible alignments and juxtapositions. Here the morning light casts shadow patterns beneath the surface of the reflection water, and the near and far rocky areas seem to connect across the lake.

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

Textures and Reflections

October 5, 2014 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Detail of a Chicago riverfront building with distorted window reflections

As is the case with a number of the Chicago photographs that I made during our August 2014 visit to the Windy City, this one was made from a boat on the Chicago River. We rarely do “tourist things” when we visit cities, usually preferring to look for more interesting stuff, but everyone we know who had been there recommended the Chicago architecture boat tours, so we gave in and took one. I have to say that it was worth it — the tour combines an intense overview of a lot of downtown Chicago architecture, a lot of background information on the structures and the development of the city, and a unique view that isn’t really available in any other way.

There is almost too much to see on the tour, since Chicago’s downtown is dense with interesting features large and small, and the boats don’t pause to let you gawk! So I photographed a lot, trying to vary my focus between the large and impressive downtown buildings and smaller details down closer to the river. This photograph falls into that second category, and is “about” the shapes and textures of the bit of a more modern building and the very deformed reflections in its windows.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: reflections

Shop Windows

Curving Branch, Rippled Water

Lake, Rocky Shoreline

Textures and Reflections

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