“Travessa de Sâo Miguel” — Narrow streets and tall buildings in Lisbon’s Alfama district.
This is another photograph from the Alfama district of Lisbon. The neighborhood is the original center of historic Lisbon, though it later became home to lower income people. It escaped the destruction from the 18th-century earthquake that leveled large portions of the city, so it retains the narrow lanes, steep hills, and older buildings of an earlier era.
“Orvieto House” — A tall house at the intersection fo two narrow streets in the hill town of Orvieto, Italy.
This Orvieto house caught my attention during one of our walks around this lovely Italian hill town last summer. The town is on a high tableland surrounded by green hills and valleys. It is bounded by steep inclines, so steep that most visitors take a funicular from the railroad station. Because of the town’s geography, a walk of any distance involves some up and down. Here the road two splits around this house, with one route rising and the other descending.
Orvieto is a day trip from Rome, though we arrived from the opposite direction and stayed for a couple of nights. This meant that we got to enjoy diminished crowds in the evening and morning, and we saw few people on this walk away from the town center toward a spot with a view of the surrounding countryside.
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 weathered green door, a green wall, a sidewalk — evening light.
First, a brief description of the photography, and then another reason that I am posting it today. I made the photograph on one of my daily walks — I try to get out and cover various routes in a radius of a couple of miles or so that add up to between 3 and 5 miles on a typical day. I always carry a camera, even though I don’t take it out on most of the walks. I’ve been past this old building quite a few times, but today I saw this door for the first time, so I stopped to photograph its worn and tilting form.
The other reason this photograph is here is that it comes from what is for me a photography tradition: the process of getting up to speed on a new camera. I usually avoid upgrading cameras too frequently. There are many reasons, but one is that I depend upon knowing a camera’s interface to the point where operation is intuitive. But eventually I do get new cameras. This was the first walk with the new Fujifilm XT5, which is going to replace the (fine) XPro2 that I’ve been using since that camera was introduced. I won’t go into the technical details at this point, but so far I’m liking the camera a lot.
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.
In many parts of the old, central portion of Florence, with its narrow streets, there is a near absence of colorful commercial signs of the sort that are so common in most American cities. (There is an area of more modern shops that feels more familiar, perhaps, to American visitors.) Along many of the streets there is little to indicate commercial establishments aside from small signs and open windows or doors. While this trattoria isn’t the only place that looks like this, it seems a bit unusual by comparison.
This photograph illustrates one of the things I like about night photography, and in particular about night photography in urban environments, namely the wildly diverse light sources. Here the interior of the little restaurant glows with light that could come from tungsten bulbs and which spills out onto the street, while the street lights down the way to the right have more of the character of daylight. But above the store is wildly saturated light from brilliantly colorful red and blue bulbs, so intense that it overwhelms most of the other light sources.
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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