Tag Archives: street

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

Yellow Buildings, Shadows, Moving Clouds

March 3, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

This seems to be the week for photographs involving a combination of preparation and serendipity. I made an unsuccessful attempt to photograph these buildings a year or so ago. I managed to get spooked and learn a little lesson in the process. Most of the time night photography is a quiet, peaceful, and slow experience. There are often very few other people around, and in the darkness you can be entirely alone. Much of the work is done slowly – wandering around looking for compositions in the near darkness first, and then waiting for long exposures to complete. On that first attempt with this subject I had set up in an abandoned parking lot next to these buildings and was standing quietly by my tripod when I heard the sound of a fast-moving car. A sixth sense told me to pay attention… and in seconds a car came speeding around the corner of a nearby building and into the parking lot! I don’t think I’ve ever grabbed my gear and run so fast! (The resulting photo is sort of funny and captures my panicked escape after perhaps 2/3 of the exposure had completed – the image of the buildings is there, but superimposed on it is a wild pattern of light formed as I spun around, carrying the camera without even taking time to close the shutter.)

Since then I wanted to try photographing these buildings again. Late in the evening of this recent shoot I noticed translucent clouds passing overhead. When such clouds are lit from below and have a chance to moving during long exposures they form interesting patterns. I quickly headed toward that same notorious parking lot… and this time found a safer spot on a raised sidewalk, which also gave me a better angle on the buildings. The clouds were moving away and to the right, so I had to work quickly to get set up and start exposures. The first one (not shown here) was a slightly wider shot. Then I thought about the zig-zagging angles and shapes of the buildings roof lines and corners and noticed that the same shapes were mirrored in the shadow cast by a nearby building. With this in mind I decided to try a tighter crop on the buildings, and I ended up with this photograph.

(Edited and updated in January 2025)

More Night Photography

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Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: Night, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Textures, Photographs: Urban/Street

Brick Wall with Windows and Doors, Artificial Light

March 1, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A brick wall with windows and a door is illuminated by garish yellow artificial lighting at Mare Island Naval Ship Yard.

During the final weekend of February I was able to join my friends from The Nocturnes for an “alumni” shoot at the historic Mare Island Naval Ship Yard at Vallejo, California. I photograph at this location a few times every year – most often with The Nocturnes – and each time I go I find something new or else find a new way to photograph something familiar.

This wall is in a little side alley off or one of the main roads through the facility. Although it certainly doesn’t look like it in this photograph, this is a fairly dark area of the island where rows of large factory buildings (mostly abandoned) are lit, for the most part, by a few security lights. Standing there next to me as I made the photograph, this is not what you would have seen. At best, I could make out the shapes and arrangement of the windows and door, recognize that the wall was constructed of bricks, and notice that the light from nearby yellowish artificial lights was diffused and broken up by shining through intervening fences and other stuff.

But, for me at least, one of the goals of night photography is to see what cannot be seen with our own eyes. The whole idea of a “realism” in night photography seems almost crazy to me, at least when shooting such dark subjects as this one. “Reality” is an incredibly dark and dim and barely visible wall. What is more interesting to me is what the camera can see in the near dark. Here it reveals the intense yellow/orange color of the artificial lighting and the uneven patterns of light and shadow.

(It also occurred to me as I worked on this photograph that while I generally am somewhat conservative with color and saturation and all the rest in my photography of natural landscapes… the wild, garish, and intense color and light of this night photography may represent an opposite pole for me.)

More Night Photography

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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.

Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Urban/Street

Urban Residential Buildings, Sidewalk and Street

January 2, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 3 Comments

Facades of residential buildings along a hilly street in downtown San Francisco.

With all of the landscape and nature photography I’ve posted recently, I figured it was time for something different. This is a street scene in San Francisco I photographed on a quick walk on an early March day in 2010. Many of the other photographs I made in this area included people, but it this one I wanted to isolate the fronts of the buildings, especially the contrast between the relatively fixed-up one on the left and the more weathered one on the right.

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.

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Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Red Tile and Door

December 27, 2010 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A stripe of bright red tiles and dilapidated doors in San Franciso’s Mission District.

This photograph was made early in 2010, and is one that I dredged up from the “archives” during the year-end process of reviewing all of my thousands of 2010 raw files. I had been in San Francisco with some spare time and I found myself in the Mission. This area is a great resource for photography, so I set out on foot to look for subjects along the crowded streets of this neighborhood. A small girl behind the heavy screen door on the left (barely visible in this photograph) first caught my attention, but I also found the juxtaposition of horizontal and vertical lines interesting along with the very weathered and distressed doors and walls. The thin line of brilliant red tiles was striking against the dark and dingy background.

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