Tag Archives: reflections

Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Window Maze

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Window Maze
Cubist patterns of color, reflections, and perspective in the windows of a San Francisco builiding

Window Maze. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Cubist patterns of color, reflections, and perspective in the windows of a San Francisco builiding.

Continuing with the theme of “windows,” here is another photograph I recently made while walking in San Francisco. My San Francisco ambling typically has a general structure — I usually arrive at the Fourth Street Caltrain Station early in the morning, then typically start walking north (often along the waterfront, though not on this visit). I photograph as I go, and eventually reach a turn-around point, where I start back towards the train station on a different route.

I made this photograph on that return walk, and I was actually in a bit of a hurry — I had just enough time to get to the station and board before my train was to leave, and missing it would have meant an hour wait. These windows caught my attention and I paused very briefly to make two exposures. The objective reality of the scene is simple — a couple of “window walls” joining at a corner — but the subjective effect is quite complex and wild, with confusing combinations of elements (the windows themselves, what lies inside, and things behind me in the reflections), perspective lines, and color.

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: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Reflections, Rocky Shoreline*

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Reflections, Rocky Shoreline
Huge rocky slabs meet the shorline of a subalpine Sierra Nevada lake

* This is the second of two photographs that I’m posting for an unusual reason — after the original post I rethought the aspect ratio of the photograph and decided that I like it in the (unusual for me!) square format. The text below is the same as that used in the original post.

Reflections, Rocky Shoreline. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Huge rocky slabs meet the shorline of a subalpine Sierra Nevada lake.

A group of us recently spent a week camped at 11,000′ in a landscape of water, glaciated rocks, meadows, and high peaks. AS the week went on we gradually pushed out the boundaries of our photographic explorations. My first view of this formation was on my initial scouting trip to this lake — I did not photograph it on that visit, but I made a mental note to return when the light would be more ideal. In this case, “ideal” meant “not in full sun,” so my plan was to come back in the early morning and evening hours. Early morning turned out to be best since the air was still at that hour, leaving the water still enough to produce coherent reflections.

I returned a few mornings later. Demonstrating once again the importance of what I might term “attentive serendipity” in photography, even though I got distracted and arrived at the lake later than planned, the timing turned out to be nearly perfect. I had a few minutes to photograph the larger landscape in the pre-sunlight “quiet light” before moving on to photograph this still-shaded scene. And once I finished here, the sunlight cooperated by arriving at a nearby rocky peninsula and both backlighting a tree and turning the water a lovely deep blue color.

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.

Blog | About | Flickr | Facebook | Email

Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Reflections, Rocky Shoreline

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Reflections, Rocky Shoreline
Huge rocky slabs meet the shorline of a subalpine Sierra Nevada lake

Reflections, Rocky Shoreline. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Huge rocky slabs meet the shorline of a subalpine Sierra Nevada lake.

A group of us recently spent a week camped at 11,000′ in a landscape of water, glaciated rocks, meadows, and high peaks. AS the week went on we gradually pushed out the boundaries of our photographic explorations. My first view of this formation was on my initial scouting trip to this lake — I did not photograph it on that visit, but I made a mental note to return when the light would be more ideal. In this case, “ideal” meant “not in full sun,” so my plan was to come back in the early morning and evening hours. Early morning turned out to be best since the air was still at that hour, leaving the water still enough to produce coherent reflections.

I returned a few mornings later. Demonstrating once again the importance of what I might term “attentive serendipity” in photography, even though I got distracted and arrived at the lake later than planned, the timing turned out to be nearly perfect. I had a few minutes to photograph the larger landscape in the pre-sunlight “quiet light” before moving on to photograph this still-shaded scene. And once I finished here, the sunlight cooperated by arriving at a nearby rocky peninsula and both backlighting a tree and turning the water a lovely deep blue color.

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.

Blog | About | Flickr | Facebook | Email

Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Glaciated Terrain

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Glaciated Terrain
A Sierra Nevada scene including glaciated slabs, a shallow lake, and old moraines

Glaciated Terrain. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A Sierra Nevada scene including glaciated slabs, a shallow lake, and old moraines.

There are quite a few “terrains” in the Sierra Nevada, ranging from foothills oak grasslands through the mid-elevation forest, and on up to the rocky alpine heights. Off all of them, I think my favorite is that found just below the treelike, where granite slabs are frequently interspersed with small trees and meadows, where you are rarely very far from water, and where evidence of the glacial heritage of the range are everywhere. There is virtually no element of this scene that doesn’t owe something to those glaciers — the smoothly rounded slabs of foreground granite, the lake lying in a scooped-out hollow where glaciers converged, the moraines (at least two of which appear in the photograph), and even the line between the tops of the glaciers and the more jagged formations that remained above their reach.

This photograph is also about light, and a more subtle form of it. I composed the scene to exclude as much of the direct morning sun as possible, but yet to take advantage of its presence nearby. One of the favorite forms of light among photographers is that which is reflected into the scene from nearby objects in bright light. Here much of the warmer colored light is of that sort, reflected into the scene from nearby slopes that were already in the direct morning sun. This light fills shadows and can add soft color to the cold tones in the shadows.

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.

Blog | About | Flickr | Facebook | Email

Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.