“So That Sheep May Safely Graze” — A road sign on a single-track road in Scottish sheep country.
On the Isle of Skye, and for that matter all over Scotland, there are sheep. A LOT of sheep. What cattle are to the American west, sheep are to Scotland, or so it seems. The sheep and their abundant pastures are a significant component of the Scottish landscape — you encounter them everywhere when you walk or drive. I’ll let you speculate on the purpose of this road sign for a moment before explaining… (If you read this post where the next paragraph is already visible, pause and see if you can figure it out.)
Expect a wide-ranging mix of photographic subjects over the next few weeks. There will certainly be more from the San Joaquin Valley, both landscapes and wildlife. I still have some older photographs from the Sierra and other locations in the queue. This photograph is part of an inevitable series of “urban landscapes” and urban/street photography from our recent visit to New York City. The latter is a favorite subject of mine. As a west-coaster, I only get to photographer there perhaps once per year, but when I do I like to take full advantage of the opportunity.
This photograph feels like an urban landscape to me. On the final day of our trip we found time to revisit the High Line Park, a place that has a different feeling at each time of year. The park, for those who may not already know, runs along the path of an old elevated railroad bed on the west side of Manhattan. It has become an incredibly popular place, but with good reason, as it winds through all sorts of interesting urban terrain a few stories above street level. A new section has opened since our last visit, and it extends the path northward to and past the Hudson Yards area. This photograph was made along the new section where it crosses 11th Avenue, and where I saw the same beautiful light that might stop me in my tracks anywhere.
Looking up Madison Street from the Manhattan Bridge, New York City
At least I think this is Madison Street, as best as I can tell by looking at maps now that I am back in California. We were up on the Manhattan Bridge when I made this photograph, high above the street level as the bridge crosses over the east shore of Manhattan. We had walked over from Brooklyn, sharing the bridge with the noisy trains and looking at the extensive graffiti on rooftops.
Our hotel was more or less on the other side of China Town on Canal Street, and we had been into that area several times, starting with a visit to a Chinese restaurant where we joined a big group of family and friends on the evening that we arrived from California. But we had not been all the way through the area to the east shoreline. The Manhattan Bridge provides some very interesting views down into this section of Manhattan. Before this point we had passed next to and above the graffiti covered rooftops that I mentioned above. Here we could look directly down on this street and up toward its end point some blocks in the distance.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Two pedestrians in blue shirts walk past architecture emphasizing vertical and horizontal lines
A photograph like this is a bit hard to explain, but I’ll try. At least a little bit. As is often the case, for some reason this structure – a parking lot – caught my attention. I like the texture of concrete when doing city photography, and this landscape of lines seemed a bit striking, and in fact it got me thinking again about the very linear nature of much of the urban environment. Aside from a few things – the green tree, the red card, and the people – essentially everything in this scene can be regarded as being a sum of horizontals and verticals, from the obvious vertical covering of the garage to the wires, to the street lanes and lane lines, to the sidewalk, and the rows of squares on the background building.
It occurs to me from time to time that there is something very unnatural about this, and it might even be a cause of the disconnect from the environment that can occur in such places. But as (pretty much) always, the constructed world is not perfectly linear. But still, to me, the two people walking along the sidewalk, whose blue attire also caught my attention, look very small and very passive relative to the constructed world they inhabit.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
