Tag Archives: willow glen

Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Mondrian Wall

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Mondrian Wall
A wall of a school building closed during the pandemic.

Mondrian Wall. © Copyright 2020 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A wall of a school building closed during the pandemic.

Why, yes, this is from the “Postcards from Pandemia” series of photographs made on my almost-daily walks in the greater neighborhood, an area including a range of subjects in suburban neighborhoods, apartment complexes, closed schools, nearly empty parks, a largely shuttered business district, and light industrial zones.

This is a detail of a wall at the front of a school that is became deserted at about the time when students would have been pushing through the last part of the academic year and looking forward to summer. If you are like me, you might find more than one way to look at this scene.

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” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.

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Photographs: Urban/Street

Exit Only

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Exit Only
An “exit only” sign attached to a wall that has not been painted recently.

Exit Only. © Copyright 2020 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

An “exit only” sign attached to a wall that has not been painted recently.

Postcard from Pandemic #2. I made this photograph on one of my SIP neighborhood walks a few weeks ago. If nothing else, the current travel restrictions are encouraging me to discover nearby things that I had not paid attention to before.

This wall is in the back of an urban business district. I’ve been around this area for decades, and I have watched it change a lot — from a quiet residential business district, to a place of fading and dying businesses, to a newly popular, somewhat upscale area with lots of restaurants and other signs of Silicon Valley wealth. For someone who has been here for a while and who recalls what was in this location in the past, this wall is a bit of a historical record.

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” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.

Blog | About | Flickr | Facebook | Email

Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

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

Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Brewery Window

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Brewery Window
A window at Hapa’s Brewery in San Jose, California

Brewery Window. San Jose, California. June 21, 2017. © Copyright 2017 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A window at Hapa’s Brewery in San Jose, California

Today’s photograph is the result of something other than endeavoring to go out and make photographs, but it might also be evidence that some kind of photograph can be made almost anywhere at almost any time. We heard there was an event hosted by Fujifilm at a relatively new brewery not too far from where we live. We have been meaning to visit this place for months without ever quite managing to go, but the prospect of getting to play with a range of Fujifilm camera equipment and try out a new brewery was enough to get us to go.

The premise of the event was loaning various Fujifilm cameras and lenses to interested folks for fifteen minutes at a time. I already really on a Fujifilm system for my street and travel photography, but I thought it would be fun to play with their tiny rangefinder X100F, a small fixed-lens camera in the street photography tradition. I didn’t have a lot of exotic subjects to work with — basically a brewery full (mostly) of people trying out cameras! This photograph had two goals. The mundane one was testing the bokeh of the fixed lens on this small camera. The aesthetic angle was placing the window frame in such a way that it divided the background into four independent images rectangles that are quite different from one another.

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” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
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Metal Wall

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Metal Wall
A metal wall leads away toward a person standing in a doorway

Metal Wall. San Jose, California. June 21, 2017. © Copyright 2017 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A metal wall leads away toward a person standing in a doorway

This certainly qualifies as an opportunistic photograph. We had heard that a local brewery was going to host a Fujifilm “drink and click” demo this evening. We’ve been wanting to try the place out, and the added attraction of being able to play with a whole bunch of Fujifilm cameras and lenses clinched the deal. A local camera store collaborated with Fujifilm to show up with a bunch of their x-trans camera bodies and good cross-section of their lenses. Since I already have the Fujifilm XPro2 camera, I was mostly interested in trying out lenses and the X100f rangefinder camera.

So I had the X100f for about 15 minutes, mostly inside the brewery but also just outside. I figured out the camera pretty quickly and then just made a bunch of handheld photographs, trying a range of techniques and settings to get a feel for the camera. For this image I was interested in seeing how the fixed 23mm f/2 would do with a narrow focus plane (at f/2) and what the resulting bokeh would look like. I think the camera passed the test pretty well.

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” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | LinkedIn | Email

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