“Red and White Boat, Adriatic Sea” — A red and white boat sails on the quiet Adriatic Sea past Dubrovnik, Croatia.
Looking at this scene, you would probably never guess where I was when I photographed it. It seems like a quiet, isolated place along the ocean shore. Truth be told, I was walking along the top of the wall around the historic city of Dubrovnik, Croatia very close to sunset. While it was fairly quiet there, it most certainly was not isolated!
I’m a fan of long views of the empty or nearly-empty ocean. I’m not quite certain why that is, though the ocean represents a sort of infinite unknown frontier for most of us. There’s something “out there” that we are unlikely to experience, a place of mystery. Here it is enhanced by the soft light and haze of the summer Adriatic as this boat passes by.
Broken, graffiti-scarred windows and walls of an abandoned industrial building.
All around the San Francisco Bay Area — and, actually, up and down the west coasts — there are sites full of institutional buildings like this one. Some are on military bases, some are old public buildings, and this one is part of a historic ship yard on San Francisco Bay. I think I was sort of peripherally aware of this sort of architecture for decades, but it wasn’t until I started a long project photographing the old Mare Island Naval Ship Yard at night that I really began to notice.
Among these kinds of buildings, this is a young one. I don’t know the actual age, but it seems like a mid-Twentieth-Century building, perhaps from the World War II or post-war period? Now it is abandoned, in a mostly forgotten corner of a much larger facility. I was there to do night photography some years back, arriving early enough to photograph it in the last light before darkness came on.
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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.
A tower against night sky at the historic Mare Island Naval Ship Yard.
This is not the first nor the only photograph I’ve made of this structure. It comes from the historic Mare Island Naval Ship Yard in the San Francisco Bay Area, the place where I did my first serious night photography almost two decades ago. (It happened on more or less a lark when I saw an announcement of a free event, showed up, and became hooked.) This structure is one half of a pair of gigantic overhead tracks that I believe originally supported some sort of lift mechanism that moved heavy mechanical systems (probably engines) to ships that were under construction. The buildings were originally various shops connected to the shipbuilding work, though today, years after the facility was decommissioned, many of them have been taken over for other purposes.
The relationship between night photographs and objective reality is a complex thing. I think of it as revealing “what the camera sees” more than as capturing what we see at night. In truth, in places like this and in lightning like this… we can’t really see much at all. But by extending the exposure times we can make images out of what is largely unseen. (A close examination of this photograph will reveal star trails made as the earth rotated beneath the night sky over the course of a several minute exposure.) In the end, many decisions about such images — luminosity, color, and more — must be subjective, since there really is no objective reality that corresponds to what the camera sees.
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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.
Light from inside a darkened building escapes through a door, casing a pattern on a dark industrial street.
This photograph comes from a San Francisco Bay Area location where I’ve been doing night photography for over 15 years. It is a place with striking visual icons including huge ship yard cranes, old buildings, and (until its removal a few years ago) a gigantic “smoke stack” towering above a power plant. Over the years I became less interested in re-photographing those things, and I began to spend more time searching out subjects that I had overlooked, scenes that are quieter and more contemplative than those icons.
I “discovered” this photograph during my pandemic-era return to old photographs that I had not looked at for years. This one exemplifies several things I’ve observed about the process of reviewing photographs shortly after making them. I usually have a few images in mind that I know will be promising, and I begin with those. As I work on the archive I invariably discover that others are more worthy than I initially expected, and this process of uncovering unexpectedly interesting photographs continues… until I am distracted by the next project, at which point I often move on and leave some interesting work behind. In this case, the “moving on” process was hastened a bit because one of my favorite night photographs came from this same evening, and I think that made me feel like I was done with that night’s work. But I wasn’t.
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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
Manage Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Join the discussion — you are welcome to leave a comment or question. (Comments are moderated and may not appear immediately.)