Tag Archives: stand

Photographs: Night, Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Urban/Street

Three Women, Grant Street

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Three Women, Grant Street
Three women stand in front of a Grant Street storefront at night, San Francisco.

Three Women, Grant Street. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Three women stand in front of a Grant Street storefront at night, San Francisco.

At this point I’m not sure I recall the exact circumstances that had me in this part of San Francisco after dark, but from the group of photographs that I have in my archive I can tell that I had made my way to the Chinatown district by evening, and after photographing there headed south past the Moscone Center, all of which suggests I had gone up there and back on the train. Taking the train to San Francisco for a day of street photography has long been a favorite activity, though I think it has now been about two years since the last attempt, aside from a few brief forays when I was up there this past fall for a couple of shows.

This San Francisco district, and others like it, are great places to photograph after dark, especially if you can work quickly, in street photography style, using a small handheld camera. There is often a fair amount of light from the combined sources of street lights, passing traffic, and the often-colorful lights spilling from commercial storefronts. With a small camera, especially at night, I can photograph without being so obvious that I intrude on the scene myself. One theme in my night street photography is people doing seemingly unusual things in a very normal human fashion. This appears to be a group of three friends passing through this area, but pausing to look in an unusual direction for just a moment.

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.

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Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Urban/Street

Waiting Man

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Waiting Man
A man stands at the curb with his head bowed, San Francisco.

Waiting Man. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A man stands at the curb with his head bowed, San Francisco.

This photograph comes from a day spent doing street photography while walking through San Francisco… just a few short months before our world changed in early 2020 and such activities become difficult, if not impossible. I still photograph “street” a bit in the areas not far from where I live, but I haven’t been back to shoot this way in San Francisco since the “before times” — though I’m starting to imagine being able to do so once again. I did just a bit of this kind of photography when I spent a few days up there during our Open Studio event at a gallery in North Beach, though I’m still distracted by streets full of masked people.

I know that some people wonder why this “nature photographer” wanders off to photograph urban environments, and some are even perplexed by the photographs. There are lots of reasons for a landscape photographer to also be a street photographer. In some ways the genres are complementary, and doing one actually has the potential to improve the other. If nothing else, photographing street can remove the “I don’t have anything to photograph!” excuse, since there’s potentially something right outside your front door. In addition, for photographers who are often more comfortable photographing things than people, this work can be a way to stretch your boundaries.

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.

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Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

People Standing By Window

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People Standing By Window
Two people stand against a dark wall next to a window, Museum of Modern Art.

People Standing By Window. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Two people stand against a dark wall next to a window, Museum of Modern Art.

This photograph comes from a Manhattan visit a few years back. We usually are there for at least a week each year — though we have not been back since before the start of the pandemic. We miss the place! We have some traditions when it comes to these visits. One is to indulge me in a lot of “museum time.” (The amount of time I’m willing to spend in such places occasionally makes me the butt of family jokes.) We visited the Museum of Modern Art on this visit, and the photograph comes from there.

I’m often a bit surprised — though by how you’d think I would not be — by how interesting I find museums as photographic spaces. They are full of interesting and sometimes unusual architecture, and they are often designed to incorporate a lot of investing lighting, especially natural lighting. In many cases there is some sort of central atrium or similar that creates a tall, vertical open area… and that provides some wild and off-kilter angles of subjects that would look quite different if photographed on their own level. Here a pair of people stands at the base of a stairway, positioned in the angle between a nearly-black wall and a window.

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.

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

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

Photographs: Coastal Redwoods, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Redwood National & State Parks

Wall of Redwoods

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Wall of Redwoods
A dense grove of closely-spaced coast redwood trees, Humboldt Redwoods State Park.

Wall of Redwoods. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A dense grove of closely-spaced coast redwood trees, Humboldt Redwoods State Park.

This dense “wall”of redwood trees is part of a grove at Humboldt Redwoods State Park in Northern California. Our experience of arriving in the grove was quite striking. We had just spent hours driving a long loop of small country roads out to part of the “Lost Coast” area, and after a somewhat steep descent the road dropped into this deep, dark, and quiet grove. We stepped out of the car into the cathedral-like experience of these incredibly large trees and paused here on our drive for some time, wandering slowly among the trees and making photographs.

I’ve written before about how photographing in the redwood forest presents a number of challenges. Some of them are objective — it is very dark here, even in the middle of the day in many cases, and one ends up using very long exposures, sometimes adding up to several seconds. And despite the sense of stillness, it seems that there is always a tiny bit of air movement that affects branches and leaves. But a more complex question is how to render photographs of these places. What the camera records here is quite different than what the eye and the mind see. For some technical reasons I’ve written about previously, while the eye sees rich and deep colors, the camera records something that can appear flatter and dimmer. So the post-processing question always becomes how to move things back toward the light and colors that we remember experiencing. When doing that it is easy to get carried away and perhaps create something that is a bit too much of a fantasy — there’s nothing objectively wrong with that, but the question of how far to go is never far away. I chose here to stick with a rather dark rendition, since I remember that this is how the scene felt to me at the time.

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.

Blog | About | Flickr | Facebook | Email

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

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