Tag Archives: usa

Metal Wall

June 22, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A metal wall leads away toward a person standing in a doorway

This certainly qualifies as an opportunistic photograph. We had heard that a local brewery was going to host a Fujifilm “drink and click” demo this evening. We’ve been wanting to try the place out, and the added attraction of being able to play with a whole bunch of Fujifilm cameras and lenses clinched the deal. A local camera store collaborated with Fujifilm to show up with a bunch of their x-trans camera bodies and good cross-section of their lenses. Since I already have the Fujifilm XPro2 camera, I was mostly interested in trying out lenses and the X100f rangefinder camera.

So I had the X100f for about 15 minutes, mostly inside the brewery but also just outside. I figured out the camera pretty quickly and then just made a bunch of handheld photographs, trying a range of techniques and settings to get a feel for the camera. For this image I was interested in seeing how the fixed 23mm f/2 would do with a narrow focus plane (at f/2) and what the resulting bokeh would look like. I think the camera passed the test pretty well.

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

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Snag and Forest

June 20, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A solitary snag stands among forest trees in the Yosemite backcountry

A group of us, a band of photographers, spent a week in a Yosemite backcountry area back in the summer of 2014. With the plan of spending a week doing extensive photography of one or two areas, our equipment was brought in by pack train — we just had to walk in carrying our photographic equipment. We settled in for a few days at an isolated lake, and then we moved to a more populated area for the final few days of our visit.

The first location was a lovely little lake, set in a broad depression on a ridge above a very large valley. This spot provided us all sorts of photographic subjects — intimate landscapes, big views across the canyon to high peaks, and the forests and meadows and rocks spread around the lake itself. On this morning I had climbed up slanting granite slabs to reach a higher area, and here I found this solitary snag standing among living trees, and backed by forest running on up into the higher peaks.

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

Photographs: France, Photographs: Urban/Street

Restaurant Windows, Benches

June 18, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Two benches outside the windows of a San Francisco restaurant

At the end of April I spent a couple of hours shooting through the golden hour and on into the evening in San Francisco, mostly exploring along The Embarcadero on the shoreline of San Francisco Bay. Our group first wandered out on a pedestrian pier, where we hung up through sunset and into early twilight as the light faded from the sky and city lights came on.

Soon I left the group — I had a long drive back home — and wandered along the Embarcadero as I headed back to my car. Photographing into restaurant and club windows intrigues me. There is often a striking contrast between the interior world of people having dinner or drinks and the exterior world of very quite urban landscapes. Here a couple of unoccupied benches sit beneath windows, with more colorful lighting and a number of patrons inside.

Photographs: Mono Lake Basin, Photographs: Nature

Mono Basin

June 9, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Desert hills, Mono Lake, Paoha Island, and the Mono Basin in morning light

When people think of Mono Lake they often seen to think first of the unusual tufa tower formations found along portions of its shoreline — and the subject of many photographs from the place. The towers are indeed impressive and unusual, and especially in the right light they can produce an almost other-worldly impression. But there is much more to be seen here.

My strongest associations with the lake do not involve tufa towers. Instead the strongest may simply be an impression of the vast space of the basin holding this giant lake, and the immense expanse of sky above — often pure blue and clear, but at times opaque with haze or broken by thunder clouds. There are sonic associations, and the strongest may be the sound of gulls and other birds, especially on a quiet and windless morning. On the morning when I made this photograph I was not at the “usual places” at dawn, but I passed by just a bit later, when the sun was a bit higher but the light was still spreading mostly sideways across the landscape, producing large and dark shadows.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: usa

Metal Wall

Snag and Forest

Restaurant Windows, Benches

Mono Basin

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