Tag Archives: street

Photographs: France, Photographs: Urban/Street

Empty Lot, Paris

July 3, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

An empty lot with graffiti and street art, Paris

I’m pretty certain that I made this photograph on the evening of our arrival in Paris in the summer of 2016. We came from London the train, arrived in the afternoon, checked into a hotel, and headed out to explore. We were staying in Montemartre, which is a fine place to wander, with narrow streets, hills, and plenty of places to eat and drink.

A bit later, at dusk, we were walking through a residential area when we passed this empty and apparently abandoned lot. It appeared that it had been commandeered by graffiti artists, who produced everything from text to images. My sense was that this produced a sort of urban landscape, and as different as this look from, say, the Sierra Nevada, it photographed it in a similar way in the fading light.

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

Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Brewery Window

June 23, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A window at Hapa’s Brewery in San Jose, California

Today’s photograph is the result of something other than endeavoring to go out and make photographs, but it might also be evidence that some kind of photograph can be made almost anywhere at almost any time. We heard there was an event hosted by Fujifilm at a relatively new brewery not too far from where we live. We have been meaning to visit this place for months without ever quite managing to go, but the prospect of getting to play with a range of Fujifilm camera equipment and try out a new brewery was enough to get us to go.

The premise of the event was loaning various Fujifilm cameras and lenses to interested folks for fifteen minutes at a time. I already really on a Fujifilm system for my street and travel photography, but I thought it would be fun to play with their tiny rangefinder X100F, a small fixed-lens camera in the street photography tradition. I didn’t have a lot of exotic subjects to work with — basically a brewery full (mostly) of people trying out cameras! This photograph had two goals. The mundane one was testing the bokeh of the fixed lens on this small camera. The aesthetic angle was placing the window frame in such a way that it divided the background into four independent images rectangles that are quite different from one another.

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

Photographs: Urban/Street

Metal Wall

June 22, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A metal wall leads away toward a person standing in a doorway

This certainly qualifies as an opportunistic photograph. We had heard that a local brewery was going to host a Fujifilm “drink and click” demo this evening. We’ve been wanting to try the place out, and the added attraction of being able to play with a whole bunch of Fujifilm cameras and lenses clinched the deal. A local camera store collaborated with Fujifilm to show up with a bunch of their x-trans camera bodies and good cross-section of their lenses. Since I already have the Fujifilm XPro2 camera, I was mostly interested in trying out lenses and the X100f rangefinder camera.

So I had the X100f for about 15 minutes, mostly inside the brewery but also just outside. I figured out the camera pretty quickly and then just made a bunch of handheld photographs, trying a range of techniques and settings to get a feel for the camera. For this image I was interested in seeing how the fixed 23mm f/2 would do with a narrow focus plane (at f/2) and what the resulting bokeh would look like. I think the camera passed the test pretty well.

Photographs: France

The Louvre

June 21, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Courtyard and people, the Louvre

We spent about a week exploring Paris during the summer of 2016. Mostly we wandered, with a few specific goals in mind, and many opportunities for (sometimes random) discoveries. But there were a few things that we knew we had to visit, and the The Louvre was, of course, on that list. The museum is gigantic, with collections that are so extensive that a single day visit — which is what we had — only affords an opportunity to visit a small portion of the museum. We managed mostly one floor of one wing.

The grounds within and around the Louvre are constructed on a monumental scale. While many parts of Paris feature narrow and twisting streets, here there are vast open courtyards and buildings that extend over great distances. This photograph was made from one of the upper levels of the museum, and it looks back toward the central open area, across which groups of people walk.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: street

Empty Lot, Paris

Brewery Window

Metal Wall

The Louvre

Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.