Metal Walled Building With Door, Tree and Lawn, Night. Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, California. February 26, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Night photograph of a metal walled building with a door, sidewalk, lawn, and tree – Mare Island Naval Ship Yard.

This is a bit of a different sort of night photograph compared to the others I have posted in this recent series. (Most of those were shot at some distance from my subjects – generally old, historic buildings – and in very saturated and colorful light.) Near the end of my evening shoot at Mare Island in late February I was walking back from a dark and lonely corner of the place when I passed a more modern facility, an out-patient clinic of some sort. This facility is something of a stark contrast to the surrounding area. The building is relatively new and the walls are not the usual brick and/or corrugated metal, but instead are a more modern-looking sort of metal paneling. There is landscaping, including small patches of lawn and small trees. And the light is completely different. Elsewhere in the darker areas of Mare Island the lighting tends toward yellow, coming from sodium vapor lamps, though it also includes green and occasionally other hues. But here the light is fairly neutral and actually looks almost white. I wasn’t quite sure what to do! :-)

But then it seemed to me that it might be interesting to see what I could do with this modern (though not flawless) structure and its surrounding landscaping. Here a small door, partly blocked by some sort of signs, leads into a very small section of a building and is lit a bit mysteriously from above. Sidewalks lead away from the door and a small, forlorn patch of lawn sits near the corner of the building, with a single leafless tree supported by stakes. When I saw this spot and when I look at the photograph now I get this feeling that there should be some story behind all of this… but I have no idea what it might be.

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