Tag Archives: walk

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

The Selfie

September 1, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

On a Manhattan sidewalk, three girls dressed in black pose for a selfie as two men walk past.

Here comes another sequence of New York City street photographs, this time with several presented in a wide panoramic format. My most common format uses a 4:3 width:height ratio, but sometimes a photograph seems to work better with something else, and the 2:1 wide panoramic format can create a sense of horizontal space that I like in some photographs. When I made this one I was working very quickly — as you can imagine, this was not exactly a shot that provided me with much time for careful and cautious thought. At the time of exposure I think I might have leaned toward a black and white rendition, in traditional street photography format, but in the end I liked the blue colors of the men’s shirts and of the shaded concrete sidewalk.

I had spotted this group of three young women — girls, really — walking down the street together and having a great time and all wearing roughly similar black outfits. (One imagines them discussing this before meeting up — “I’m thinking of wearing black. How about you?”) There is usually a lot happening on the street, so my attention likely switched away from something else to consider them for only a brief moment, and when I looked back and saw them setting up for that most contemporary ritual, the selfie, I quickly made a few exposures. In an example of lucky timing, the two guys in blue shirts walked into the scene from behind me at just the right moment.

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

Little Italy, Evening

August 27, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Visitors pack closed streets though Manhattan’s Little Italy.

Walking more or less northwest from New York’s Chinatown district after dinner we ended up heading through Little Italy. As we walked on this Sunday evening we started seeing huge crowds of people and we soon figured out why. Apparently the streets through here are closed on Sunday evening, and restaurants tables spill out across the sidewalks, and people end up walking up and down the middle of the streets. The photograph is deceptive — it shows perhaps the smallest number of people that I saw here, and most of the time the streets were packed.

Originally we “planned” (to the extent that we were operating on any kind of plan!) to just walk through here, but it was so lively that we slowed down, stopping for sidewalk gelato, and I made some photographs. The colors were intensified by the diminishing late-day light, and I held my camera above my head and shot blind to get this elevated point of view. Ideally, I think this image works best as a large print, since there are so many small details to look at that aren’t easily visible in this small web version.

Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Urban/Street

Walking Man, Columns

June 29, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A man walks between architectural columns, San Francisco

This is what I think of as a “compose and wait” shot, something I often do when shooting street photography. I find an interesting composition — here the series of columns, with shadows falling across them, and the mottled foreground light reflected from the windows of nearby downtown buildings — and then I wait for a person to walk into the frame and provide a center of visual interest.

This approach provides an interesting combination of intentional and carefully composed elements (the selection of overall subject and its composition) with elements that are almost completely out of my control — I have no idea who will walk into the frame, exactly where they will be, or what they will be doing. Things tend to happen very quickly, too. Obviously, I could not really track this subject into the frame, as he was behind these large columns, so I have to react quickly. In truth, when I work this way I often end up making quite a few exposures that just don’t quite work… but if I’m lucky it may all fall together in a single frame.

Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Person, Stairs, Wall, Windows

February 9, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A person ascends stairs inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

On this day, halfway through our late-December week in New York City, we finally had some bad weather. Not as bad as the snowstorms that shut down the city a week or so later, but enough cold rain that walking around Manhattan was starting to seem a lot less appealing than it had been the day before. We decided that the weather would make it a good day for indoor activities, so we got on the subway and headed up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art… where we joined what seemed like about half of New York City in using the Museum as a rainy day activity!

If you have been there, you know that this museum is huge – far too big to see the whole thing in a day. We’ve gone a number of times, each time poking into new areas that we had not seen before and visiting a few familiar areas. This time we visited some galleries displaying photography and finally ended up way in the back of the facility in a section of newer architecture. This seemed like an odd spot to me. What here looks like the exterior windows of a building, with a sidewalk in front, is actually inside the museum. If I recall correctly, it is in an area where new and old architecture meet.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: walk

The Selfie

Little Italy, Evening

Walking Man, Columns

Person, Stairs, Wall, Windows

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