Tag Archives: restaurant

Buddha Bodai One

Buddha Bodai One
People assemble outside of Buddha Bodai One on Christmas Eve

Buddha Bodai One. Manhattan. December 24, 2015. © Copyright 2016 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

People assemble outside of Buddha Bodai One on Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve in New York City, and after joining the throngs up on Fifth Avenue we headed down to China Town for dinner, planning to eat at a place that we’ve gone to in the past. We arrived and it was surprisingly crowded and when I asked I was told that the wait would be “an hour and a half or longer!” Hey, the food is good… but not that good, so we set out to find an alternative. We wandered the area a bit, figured out that just about everything on Mott Street was similarly crowded, and then headed off to a different street where we found a quieter Vietnamese place.

While wandering Mott Street to look for an alternative I kept the camera out and made a series of photographs of scenes along this street. It was a great spot to photograph, with lots of people who were often somewhat static in front of businesses and restaurants, and streets so narrow that signs from lights tended to fill in the shadows across the street. For me the elements of a photograph in a place like this include the light itself, whether flowing across sidewalks and into the streets or the light of the business signs; lots of color; and people assembling themselves into interesting arrangements. Here many of the individuals in the group are doing interesting things — a woman pushes a child in a stroller (which, for some reason, is starting to be a motive in my street photography), another woman seems to be slightly off-balance, a couple is in a darker area off to the right, and an older man stands along in front of a stairway, looking alone and slightly uncomfortable.


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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Food Sing

Food Sing
Food Sing Chinese food take out and eat in, Brooklyn

Food Sing. Brooklyn, New York. December 22, 2015. © Copyright 2015 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Food Sing Chinese food take out and eat in, Brooklyn

On our first full day in New York this past December we took the subway to this area of Brooklyn to meet up with one of our sons (and later his fiancé and eventually our other son and his fiancé) and wandered around the area a bit, ending up on the waterfront of the East River in an area that seems to be developing rapidly. (This Californian, being from the San Francisco Bay Area, certainly recognized the familiar signs of rapid expansion and wild real estate price inflation…)

Later we walked back up and away from the water looking for food — by the local clock is was lunch time, but by our jet-lagged internal clocks it seemed like a good opportunity for breakfast. As we walked I, of course, had my little street photography camera out and I photographed this and that subject as we moved along. This corner restaurant intrigued me for a bunch or reasons. Certainly the name, which no doubt has meaning that I can’t quite parse, is suggestive with its references to the practical (food) and the aesthetic (sing). But the colors and shapes of the building also intrigue me — the contrast between the hot yellow and red of the awning, the cool tones of blue, and the bits of drab urban street scene, photographed at a moment that was almost free of people.


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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Bow Hon Seafood Restaurant

Bow Hon Seafood Restaurant
A group of people waits for a table at the Bow Hon Seafood Restaurant.

Bow Hon Seafood Restaurant. San Francisco, California. July 25, 2015. © Copyright 2015 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A group of people waits for a table at the Bow Hon Seafood Restaurant.

This photograph comes from an evening of night photography in San Francisco, mostly in and around the Chinatown district. This is, of course, a popular tourist area, but somehow the night changes things and makes it perhaps a bit less tacky — or maybe just tacky in more interesting ways! Many of the shops seem to close down early here, even though this was a weekend evening in the height of the San Francisco summer tourist season.

This is almost one of those “photographs of nothing special,” though I think that many of us can identify with the feeling of standing outside small restaurant in an urban area, talking and perhaps waiting for a table as the street life passes by. When shooting handheld photography at night I seek out this little pools of light beneath commercial signs or in the light spilling our from well-lit businesses.


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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Narrow Street, Heidelberg

Narrow Street, Heidelberg
People stroll past a restaurant along a narrow street of Altstadt-Heidelberg

Narrow Street, Heidelberg. Heidelberg, Germany. July 10, 2013. © Copyright 2013 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

People stroll past a restaurant along a narrow street of Altstadt-Heidelberg

Here is another photograph from our 2013 visit to Heidelberg, Germany. (And London, and Bavaria, and Salzburg. Can we go back, now?) We stayed within walking distance of the altstadt section of Heidelberg, the old town area along the Neckar River and near the castle, and we walked over by way of the Philosophen Weg many times, hiking up and over a small hill between where we stayed and this popular area.

Being in the old town, it is no surprise that the streets are very narrow here. In most of this section of the town there are no cars, and people walk everywhere — except for the many folks on bicycles — and restaurants spill out onto the streets.


G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | FacebookGoogle+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email


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