Tag Archives: white

Photographs: People, Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Urban/Street

Man In White Pants

November 4, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A man walks into the sun on a San Francisco sidewalk

After more than a month filled with colorful photographs of autumn foliage in the Eastern Sierra Nevada, I’m going to cleanse my palate a bit… with a black and white street photograph. I know it seems odd and even inexplicable to some that someone who photographs the natural world and likes to spend time there would also be attracted to photographing the constructed world of urban streets — but I do. In some ways I think of this other universe as more of an extension of the same way of seeing that attracts me to natural landscapes. These are simply urban landscapes and they are populated by people rather than animals. The same light falls on the city and on the mountains. In addition, photographing street tunes up my visual sense, forcing me to quickly see and respond to compositions, light, and subjects.

On a couple of occasions this past summer I joined a small group of like-minded photographers to wander around parts of San Francisco making photographs at night. We generally assembled in the late afternoon, photographed first in the daylight late in the day, grabbed a bite to eat, and then headed back out into the evening to photograph street scenes under ambient and artificial light. Here I headed up a street into the late afternoon light, focusing initially on the backlit subjects and the lengthening shadows, and then this fellow walked into the scene.

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

Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Yellow Leaves, White Trunks

October 30, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A few yellow leaves remain in a grove of small, tightly packed Eastern Sierra aspens

With this year’s unusual Eastern Sierra fall color transition, I had plenty of opportunities to photograph aspen groves with few or no leaves. Most likely as a result of the four-year California drought, some aspen trees seemed to be under a lot of stress. Some of these trees were bare very early in the season, others changed colors a week or more early, and other simply lost their leaves without a real color transition. (Fortunately, some trees were not as stressed, and these prolonged the color season to and beyond the usual time in mid to late October.)

I enjoy photographing dense groves of small trees, with their complex and packed patterns of trunks and leaves. I spotted this grove a day earlier while in the area, so late in the day when the light started to fade and I found myself nearby, I headed back this way to photograph the grove in fading light. I like photographing aspens in this light, as it fills in the shadows, avoids the stark shadows of midday light, and tends to saturate the colors naturally. I searched this grove for the right spot and finally found it here — a place with almost uniformly dense small trees and a band of strongly colored leaves running horizontally.

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

Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Almost Leafless

September 30, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A few yellow leaves remain in a dense grove of small eastern Sierra Nevada aspen trees

Strange things have happened with the aspen color change this year. While some things seem to be on a fairly normal schedule — for example, there are still a lot of eastern Sierra aspen trees that are completely green — I have seen two common difference. First, the color started to change a bit earlier, and I found good color perhaps a week earlier than I might in a more typical, non-drought year. Second, it is clear that some groves of trees seem to have simply dropped their leaves, with little or no color appearing first. (Don’t worry too much. While there are certainly examples of this occurrence, the majority of the trees do not seem to be affected by this.)

Far up an eastern Sierra canyon where I photograph aspens every year I know of places where a variety of aspen types can usually be found. I visited one where it is not uncommon for a dense carpet of brilliant color from a grove of densely packed trees covers a particular mountainside. However, this year the groves was almost completely bare of leaves when I visited in late September. At first I was disappointed, but I soon recalled how much I like groves that are mostly white trunks and branches, with only a few colorful leaves remaining — and I made a few photographs. The idea here was not so much to construct a clear and obvious composition, but instead to capture a sort of wall of aspen trunks and branches, with that wonderful bit of color still holding on.

Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Urban/Street

White Building, Overpass, Empty Lot

September 6, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Urban scene, downtown San Francisco

This is another urban landscape, and it is at least partially about light. I was walking north toward the central Market Street area of The City when I passed underneath this highway overpass. I had stopped to photograph some interesting columns and fences there, since the area is currently transformed by a major construction project, with lanes close and fences up everywhere.

Emerging from the underpass I looked across the street and back at the edge of the highway above and saw the start nearly-white building, the empty lot, the cyclone fencing, the bridge and the way that all of these forms fit together, especially with the linkage from diagonal lines of the large shadow and its smaller twin, the foreground fencing also descending from left to right.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: white

Man In White Pants

Yellow Leaves, White Trunks

Almost Leafless

White Building, Overpass, Empty Lot

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