Tag Archives: white

Photographs: Southern California, Photographs: Urban/Street

Red and White Cars, Fence

July 12, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Red and white cars parked behind a white-painted metal fence, Venice, California

Just because I made the photograph on April Fools Day doesn’t necessarily mean that it is a joke. Or does it? (Probably not.)

We were in Venice, California for a) our daughter’s birthday and b) a visit to the G2 Gallery, a great gallery space that presents a lot of work that I/we can relate to — work by Jack Dykinga, among others, was there when we visited. Once we finished in the gallery it was time to look for coffee and food, so we wandered off down the street. As usual, I lagged behind making photographs of various bits and pieces of the urban landscape. This was an odd little place. It appears to have originally been a church, but is now some sort of office. The entire building is painted start white, including the metal fence across the front. Inside were a bunch of white cars (!), but with one bright red one. A photograph was called for…

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

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Wildlife

Great Egret

January 27, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A great egret in flight against cloudy sky

This particular egret and I shared a few brief seconds of photography as the bird suddenly emerged, already in flight, from a brushy area along the edge of a pond at a Sacramento Valley wildlife refuge. In most ways, the egrets are at their most graceful while in flight, but this is when they are also the most difficult to photograph. Usually they take off and fly away from the photographer, and they are soon too far away to photograph. This one, however, flew parallel to my position and gave me a good side view. I only had a brief interval to raise my camera, find the egret in the viewfinder, and track it as I squeezed of a sequence of photographs.

I shared another one a few days ago. I interpreted that one in black and white, so I thought I’d work this one out in color. There was a great deal of softness in the original image — while parts of the wings are in focus, the large aperture and motion of the bird left other parts soft. So I decided to go with that soft effect and, in fact, amplify it and to then also go with a bit of a high key treatment, further emphasizing the brightness of the bird against a bright, cloudy sky.

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

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Wildlife

Great Egret

January 14, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Great egret in flight above winter landscape, Sacramento Valley

I photographed this great egret in flight at a refuge in the Sacrament Valley recently. Despite being quite common birds, they are not quite easy to photograph as one might think, at least not when in flight. If you are, as I was on this occasion, approaching very slowly in a vehicle, the birds will often let you get quite close. Then they either stay on the ground, perhaps walking away, and providing a less interesting photographic subject, or they suddenly take flight and most often quickly move away from you. And the backsides of egrets in flight are, while not entirely uninteresting, not nearly as interesting as frontal or side views.

This one emerged from some brush along the refuge’s perimeter roadway and flew past my position. I managed to bring the camera up fairly quickly, but it is not an easy thing to go from (slowly) driving a car to stopping the vehicle, raising a camera equipped with a long lens, and almost instantly trying to track and photograph the bird. This is my way of explaining that in a series of perhaps 10-12 rapid images of the bird, only a few provided an appealing combination of the bird in an interesting position, bird in the frame (!), and a background that worked. As I worked on the photograph I felt that it was softer than I had hoped for, but then I realized that I could work with that softness rather than against it, and I came up with a somewhat abstracted view of the beautiful and grace flight of this bird against an amorphous background of distant clouds.

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Night, Photographs: Urban/Street

Man in White, Mosco Street

December 28, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Christmas Eve in New York City.Earlier in the day we had wandered around in midtown, making photographs in cloudy and occasionally drizzly conditions. Eventually we made it up to near Central Park to join our younger son and his future wife at a place where he proposed to her earlier this year. Then we wandered down along the park and across to join the mob scene on Fifth Avenue until the crowds become overwhelming.

Time for dinner, so we head to Chinatown, where there is a restaurant at which we’ve eaten with our sons on a few previous Christmas visits. It is supposed to be — and it was — a place that is good but not necessarily widely known. We arrive and find that the wait is “at least an hour and a half.” As someone later said, “The cat is out of the bag.” We quickly figure out that most of the other nearby restaurants are nearly as crowded, so we decide to walk a few blocks to a Vietnamese place. As we walk down Mosco Street a cook takes a break on the sidewalk, lit by the light spilling out of the door to the kitchen.

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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” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him. Blog | Bluesky | Mastodon | Substack Notes | Flickr | Email

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: white

Red and White Cars, Fence

Great Egret

Great Egret

Man in White, Mosco Street

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