Tag Archives: salzburg

Salzburg Castle, Bavarian Alps, Sky

Salzburg Castle, Bavarian Alps, Sky
Looking towards the Bavarian Alps from the Salzburg Castle

Salzburg Castle, Bavarian Alps, Sky. Salzburg, Austria. July 17, 2013. © Copyright 2013 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Looking towards the Bavarian Alps from the Salzburg Castle

I’ll admit that this photograph has one of the more unusual compositions among my photographs. Late in the afternoon on a summer day, I made the photograph from within an upper courtyard of the Salzburg Castle during our visit to that part of the world a couple of years ago. We were actually staying in Bavaria, in the portion of the distant mountains that is in Germany, but we arrived by train in Salzburg, departed the same way, and managed to travel down to the flatlands and visit the city on a couple of other occasions.

The castle is a spectacular place, located on the high ground above the old town and a bend in the river and having a commanding view of the surrounding flatlands and all the way to the mountains. As impressive as it is to us today, it must have been far more impressive when it was built. From this vantage point I was just able to see over one of the upper walls toward the mountains, and the backlit, hazy sky glowed. I suppose that the photograph is all about shapes, mostly abundant rectangles, but also the triangular shapes of the roof of the white building. The mountains echo those shapes, but inverting the tones — where the white buildings are the lightest things in their part of the image, the mountains are the darkest things in the upper rectangle holding the distant landscape.


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


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Lamp, Narrow Street

Lamp, Narrow Street
A lamp, old buildings, and a narrow street, Salzburg, Austria

Lamp, Narrow Street. Salzburg, Austria. July 17, 2013. © Copyright 2013 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A lamp, old buildings, and a narrow street, Salzburg, Austria

With this photograph I’m back to that theme of the lamps on the walls of Salzburg, Austria. As I mentioned in an earlier post, once I noticed them I began to see them everywhere, always attached to the exterior walls of buildings and always with the same lamp shape, the same curving stem, and the same two bars to brace it.

This one is actually in part of the Salzburg castle, if I recall correctly. It was getting to be late in the afternoon and the angle of the sun was becoming lower, creating more shadows with their blue-toned light. In the photograph one wall is still lit but the sun, and the foreground wall picks up a bit of the reflected glow of sunlight on a wall behind my camera position. Given that the place was busy with tourists, I had to be patient and wait for a moment when the scene was clear.


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 and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Lamp, Shadow

Lamp, Shadow
A lamp casts a shadow across a textured wall, Salzburg, Austria

Lamp, Shadow. Salzburg, Austria. July 17, 2013. © Copyright 2013 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A lamp casts a shadow across a textured wall, Salzburg, Austria

This is another take on the ubiquitous Salzburg lamps found attached to the walls of many buildings. In the afternoon the light passes right across the textured surface of this wall, producing shadow that is much longer than the lamp itself.

I don’t know what the actual story is regarding these lamps, but once I recognized them I started seeing them all over the place around Salzburg, attached to the walls of various buildings  and braced by a pair of curving metal pieces. In many places their locations seemed almost haphazard to me.


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.

Salzburg, Bavarian Alps

Salzburg, Bavarian Alps
Countryside around Salzburg, Austria and the Bavarian Alps, as seen from the Hohensalzburg castle.

Salzburg, Bavarian Alps. Salzburg, Austria. July 17, 2013. © Copyright 2013 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Countryside around Salzburg, Austria and the Bavarian Alps, as seen from the Hohensalzburg castle.

As I have mentioned in earlier posts, while we did not actually stay in Salzburg during our 2013 trip to London, Germany, and a tiny bit of Austria, were there on several days during our week near Berchtesgaden, Bavaria. We arrived in Salzburg by train from Heidelberg, and we left from Salzburg on the return journey. In between we made additional visit to Salzburg and the surrounding area.

On this visit we decided to walk up to and into the Salzburg Castle, sitting high above the old city. The castle is worth the visit for many reasons, but if you keep climbing… and climbing… and climbing you can eventually reach the highest accessible point, from which you have huge panoramic views in all directions. Behind me was the city itself, and stretching off in this direction was an alternative patchwork of buildings and fields and trees that appeared to reach all the way to the base of the Alps in the far distance.


G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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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.