Street art in a doorway, bouquet of flowers, London street
It has been a very busy day and another busy day is beginning, so this will be a short post today. As we walked past this spot in London on a summer 2013 visit it seemed that perhaps not everyone had been equally enthusiastic about the Olympic Games coming to London…
Earlier today we were talking about how it has been too long since we’ve been across the Atlantic — our last trip was back in the summer of 2013. We started in London, spending nearly a full week there, enough time to feel like we were beginning to get past the most obvious things — but not nearly enough time exhaust the possibilities of the place. Making that trip extra special, we managed to meet up with a bunch of family members there, and then continue more or less together as we continued on to Germany for about a another two weeks.
As I like to do in American cities, we wandered a fair amount while we were in London. While I know that planning is very useful when going to a new place and having limited time, I know that I also like to just follow my nose a bit and get out and walk around and see where I end up — in some ways I feel that this may eventually give me a better sense of a place. Not that this location is exactly off the beaten track! In fact, this photograph shows details of one of the best known iconic bridges, with bits of the River Thames visible in the background.
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The skeleton of a bleached plant casts shadows across a sandstone slab
In the fall I spent some time making photographs in Utah, getting to a good number of locations, including some I returned to for more photography following previous visits. Partway through this trip I had plans to rendezvous with a group of friends (some new and some old) and photographers in a somewhat remote part of the state. We met, headed out, and spent the next few days camped “out there,” making photographs every day and visiting some very beautiful places.
On the first day of my meeting with this group we found a place to camp and began to settle in. That process took place pretty quickly, as all of us have spent a lot of time camping and we don’t need a lot of luxuries — in addition to friends we need food, a campfire, a place to sleep, and a spot by the fire for our chairs. So I soon found myself with a few hours of late afternoon free time between the camp chores and our evening shoot. I wandered off into nearby hills and eventually ended up on a sandstone bench with a bit of a view of the surrounding terrain. On top of this flat, dry, and nearly lifeless spot there were several plants that had tried to make a living here, setting down roots in tiny pockets of sandy soil and then growing horizontally across the rock. The first thing that attracted me was the stark contrast between the bleached plant and the red rock sandstone, but (as is always the case) the more I looked the more I saw. The curve of the white branch at the right edge of the frame is echoed by the similar upward curve of the eroded bit of darker rock on the left side, and a darker parallel version of the plant falls on the rock in the form of a shadow.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
A single black-necked stilt works it way across a shallow pond.
This is a fairly simply little picture with a simple story. We arrived early at this refuge on this mid-February day. It began with thick tule fog, but before long the fog began to thin and the blue of the sky reflected on the surface of this shallow wetland pond. There were quite a few birds here — the usual geese and sandhill cranes flying by overhead, night herons in the brush on the other side of the water, avocets, and a few of these wonderful black-necked stilts, with the long and strikingly red legs.
Mostly the birds worked their way among grasses and water plants, but for a moment this one moved into an area of water colored by blue reflected light from the clearing sky, leaving a wake in its path. I decided to compose the photograph with the bird near the top of the frame to suggest its distance and to let the large, uninterrupted foreground suggest that large surface area of the pond.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
