A male redwing blackbird perches on winter vegetation.
Redwing blackbirds, especially when they flock together, seem like some of the most exuberant birds in my part of the world. On the ideal morning, hundreds (or more!) of them may assemble on a tree or among reeds, chirping and singing enthusiastically… only to suddenly and unexpectedly take to the air in tightly spaced groups whose flight patterns are amazing.
I didn’t have quite that experience on this occasion, but it was still a worthwhile moment. This bird was perched by itself on this winter wetland vegetation. As the male birds do, he was showing off his bright red wing patches as he faced m , with the wetland landscape barely visible in the distant background
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 and Amazon.
Interior of the Meat Centre after closing time, Manhattan.
Businesses like this one, located along the edge (as I understand it) of Manhattan’s Chinatown district, fascinate me. There is often a sort of rough edge about them, but it implies that they are places where real work is done, and not that they are unkempt or that the owners and workers do not care. Quite to the contrary, as I look around this scene I see that essentially everything in it has a distinct place and a real-world purpose.
Technically this is a kind of “night photograph,” since I made the image while walking along a dark street and looking into this and similar businesses. Aside from restaurants and drinking establishments and the ubiquitous convenience stores, most of the businesses like this one were closed or closing. Here, the appearance suggests that the place has been cleaned up and organized at the end of the work day.
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 and Amazon.
A California winter landscape photograph reduced to its compositional fundamentals.
This photograph fits into a category I describe as “imaginary landscapes,” a type defined loosely by where it sits along the continuum between supposed representational reality and abstraction of landscape-derived materials. That might seem an overly-wordy way to describe it, but I’m always cognizant of the fact that no landscape photograph is truly objective or fully “real” — all photographs and certainly all landscape photographs necessarily are subjective. This could be due to something as basic (and obvious!) as the fact that the photographer chose to point the camera at some specific thing (and not at other things). It includes equipment choices( length of lens, aperture, etc.), basic interpretive choices (color or black and white, and how to handle either of those), and much, much more. In my “imaginary landscape” photographs I think I’m simply making this stuff more plainly obvious.
This one also illustrates, I think, something that figures into the landscape (but not just landscape!) photographs of virtually every photographer that I know of — the photograph is not just about the ostensible subject of the image. For most photographers other things also appeal — the shapes of things, their colors (a huge topic, by the way), how the components fit together, how things may be suggested rather than declared, and more. Allow me to make a musical analogy here. There’s a famous (or infamous) piece by composer/philosopher John Cage called 4’33”. In it a performer, takes the stage in the manner of any classical performer, then sits in front of a (usually) piano silently for 4′ 33″. One way to look at this is to recognize that Cage gave us every element of a musical performance but the one we think is central, thus forcing us to think about all of those “other details” and their central role in our perception of music. A photograph with no details (“the horror!”) may work in a somewhat similar (though not quite identical) way. Or maybe you just like the colors? ;-)
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 and Amazon.
A scooter lies abandoned on a San Francisco sidewalk.
I almost stepped on this scooter while walking through a section of San Francisco. Scooters are everywhere it our urban environment now — the new electric rental scooters abandoned on sidewalks along with the smaller number of scooters owned by individuals… some of which rely on old-fashioned muscle propulsion. It is hard to say precisely why I photographed this one — in fact, a lot of my street photography is done quickly and without a lot of careful consideration. Stuff happens quickly “on the street.” I know that its weathered and broken character caught my attention, and the green color on the wheel is the sort of thing that often attracts my notice. It also seemed like its color was not that different from the concrete sidewalk on which it had been ab abandoned.
If you like looking for meaning in photographs — beyond the intrinsic meanings of form and color and texture and all of that stuff — you could problem find some in this scene. I’ll toss out a few thoughts to get you started, but I’ll also warn you that I likely didn’t think of any of them, at least not consciously, as I made the photograph. The red curb line at the top of the image indicates a place where there is no stopping. Finding such a popular and commonplace item as an urban scooter turned to trash brights thoughts about the disposable economy. Why is that rear wheel green? Perhaps you can think of others…
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 and Amazon.
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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