Tag Archives: white

Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Urban/Street

Pipes, Window, Stucco Wall, and Shadows

August 26, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Late winter shadows fall across a suburban scene composed of a stucco wall, pipes, and a window

This is the second of two “walking around” photographs made in my neighborhood while wandering around with a camera and a couple of lenses. These walks are exercises in seeing, in several ways: When I carry the camera I pay a lot more attention to things around me that I would otherwise simply not see at all, and the process of looking and seeing photographs in places that are so mundane that I might regularly walk past them helps “tune up” my seeing skills.

As I often do, on this walk I was paying a lot of attention to shadows falling across the walls of buildings. As I write in my last photo post, once I started noticing the shadows, which are everywhere in this area, I began to see the buildings differently. For example, here is a building that I might otherwise have simply thought of as a tan building. But now it is a building with branches “painted” over almost its entire surface. And in this one, the branch shadows converge on the mundane little collection of faucets and wires and what-not at the lower left, then spread and open up to surround the white window frame above and to the right.

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: England, Photographs: People, Photographs: Urban/Street

London Street Market

August 17, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A London street market near closing time.

This is another photograph made in the narrow streets along the south side of the Thames river roughly in the area of the Millennium and Southwark Bridges, where we found ourselves with some time to kill late one afternoon. As we walked around with no firm plan in mind we came to a location where a street market was just closing, and the many vendors were making their final sales of the day and starting to close up shop.

Visually this was an absolutely compelling place to photograph, though I’m not at all sure I was able to do it justice – and I would go back given the chance. The many stalls selling almost anything you can imagine created their own interest; the place was packed with people shopping or just walking through on their way to some other place. And being under a bridge and in places in old buildings with lots of glass above, the light was truly wonderful. I spent perhaps a half hour walking through the area, shooting like crazy, and I especially liked the spots like this one where I could position myself in shadow and shoot directly toward the late afternoon light.

Photographs: Mono Lake Basin, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Mono Lake Sky

August 16, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Afternoon thunderstorms develop over the eastern Sierra Nevada and Mono Lake

I think that many people are initially drawn to Mono Lake by the famous and often photographed tufa tower formations, and I have certainly sought out and photographed that subject quite a few times. But the more I go there the less I’m interested primarily in the tufas, and the more I find myself drawn to and thinking about other things. These include the immense space and deep quite surrounding the lake, broken by the cries of birds, especially when you visit at the quietest time around dawn. I also am drawn to the sky above this lake – which is often, frankly, rather barren, but when filled with the right kind of clouds can almost be the subject itself.

But only almost, so in this photograph I decided to include a thin strip of the reflecting water of the lake along with the darker formation of Black Point and the hills rising beyond in order to anchor that sky to something solid. This was one of those afternoons when thunder storms were trying to develop, but couldn’t quite build sufficiently before sundown. But this still left some very spectacular clouds, especially where updrafts pushed their tops high into the light. I suppose that there are several reasons that I chose to make this a black and white photograph, but one very practical reason was that the lower reaches of the atmosphere were a bit brown from a nearby wildfire, and I could better adapt to that in monochrome.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Fisherman, Ellery Lake, Sierra Crest

August 15, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A lone fisherman casts into Ellery Lake beneath ridges rising through haze toward the Sierra Nevada crest

This photograph includes a subject that I’ve stopped and looked at many time, thinking there must be a photograph in it somewhere – and even trying to photograph it a few times – but never quite figuring out how to see it. Ironically, it was the wildfire haze and smoke that made it work for me this time, as that haze muted some of the over-abundance of fine detail that I think can distract from the larger form in this scene, and which also muted the bright reflections on the water which can otherwise be hard to manage.

I thought of this as monochrome image when I made it. (I don’t always know that at the time of exposure, but with digital we have the luxury of making that decision later if necessary.) My first thought was to make it a “natural” landscape, but I noticed that a fisherman had appeared along the left end of the foreground peninsula. Often my first reaction to the appearance of a person in my landscapes is to wait for the person to move. But I have learned that sometimes a very small figure in the landscape can change the image in ways that seem oddly out of proportion to the size of the figure. Here, especially in a larger print, the little figure against the background of the shining water changes everything, I think. Place the tip of your finger over that person to cover him, and see if you see what I mean. I did also continue to make a few more exposures after he left, but I like this one the best.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: white

Pipes, Window, Stucco Wall, and Shadows

London Street Market

Mono Lake Sky

Fisherman, Ellery Lake, Sierra Crest

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