Tag Archives: travel

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Redrock Country, Near Fruita

June 27, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Cliffs and eroded towers near Fruita, Capitol Reef National Park

I’m a sucker for juxtapositions of mountains and cliffs, and sunlit and shadowed surfaces. (In fact, “juxtaposition” is a word I think about a lot when making photographs.) This part of the world provides these juxtapositions with a vengeance. Everywhere in the red rock country of the Southwest there are sandstone walls, lined up, building one on top of the other, standing in front of and behind each other, layered with eroded rock and soil, standing above valleys and beyond lower ridges.

We had only a brief time to photograph on this first afternoon in Capitol Reef National Park. I had arrived in the middle of the afternoon and then busied myself with setting up a tent and a few other camp chores, plus catching up on the news with my friend Dave. By the time all of these important things had been taken care of the sun was rapidly dropping toward the horizon, so we quickly headed to a nearby area to see what sort of late-day light we could find. Literally within minutes of leaving our campground (which is just to the right of the shadowed trees visible in the lower part of the photograph) we came upon this intense and saturated late-day light, with shadows starting to stretch across the valley and the low foreground ridges.

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

Photographs: Austria, Photographs: Urban/Street

Bicycles, Old Wall

June 25, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Bicycles lean against an old stone wall in Salzburg, Austria

This is another photograph from our visit to England, Germany, and Salzburg, Austria a few summers ago. (We need to go back! Not this summer, though.) From our “home base” in Heidelberg, Germany we travelled south by train to Salzburg on our way to Bavaria, where a big group of us stayed in a farm-house near Berchtesgaden and the Königsee for a week.

Since that area is so close to Salzburg and since we arrive and departed via that city, we ended up visiting Salzburg several times, often walking around the city with cameras at the ready. Cars really can’t get into the central old town area, so almost everyone walks, with bicycles serving as a faster mode of transportation for some. And there are bicycles everywhere, including these two parked against a very old stone wall.

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

Photographs: Austria

Salzburg Castle, Bavarian Alps, Sky

June 9, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Looking towards the Bavarian Alps from the Salzburg Castle

I’ll admit that this photograph has one of the more unusual compositions among my photographs. Late in the afternoon on a summer day, I made the photograph from within an upper courtyard of the Salzburg Castle during our visit to that part of the world a couple of years ago. We were actually staying in Bavaria, in the portion of the distant mountains that is in Germany, but we arrived by train in Salzburg, departed the same way, and managed to travel down to the flatlands and visit the city on a couple of other occasions.

The castle is a spectacular place, located on the high ground above the old town and a bend in the river and having a commanding view of the surrounding flatlands and all the way to the mountains. As impressive as it is to us today, it must have been far more impressive when it was built. From this vantage point I was just able to see over one of the upper walls toward the mountains, and the backlit, hazy sky glowed. I suppose that the photograph is all about shapes, mostly abundant rectangles, but also the triangular shapes of the roof of the white building. The mountains echo those shapes, but inverting the tones — where the white buildings are the lightest things in their part of the image, the mountains are the darkest things in the upper rectangle holding the distant landscape.

Photographs: Austria

Lamp, Narrow Street

May 31, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A lamp, old buildings, and a narrow street, Salzburg, Austria

With this photograph I’m back to that theme of the lamps on the walls of Salzburg, Austria. As I mentioned in an earlier post, once I noticed them I began to see them everywhere, always attached to the exterior walls of buildings and always with the same lamp shape, the same curving stem, and the same two bars to brace it.

This one is actually in part of the Salzburg castle, if I recall correctly. It was getting to be late in the afternoon and the angle of the sun was becoming lower, creating more shadows with their blue-toned light. In the photograph one wall is still lit but the sun, and the foreground wall picks up a bit of the reflected glow of sunlight on a wall behind my camera position. Given that the place was busy with tourists, I had to be patient and wait for a moment when the scene was clear.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: travel

Redrock Country, Near Fruita

Bicycles, Old Wall

Salzburg Castle, Bavarian Alps, Sky

Lamp, Narrow Street

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