Tag Archives: window

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

Window Shadows and Reflections

August 19, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The shadows and faint reflections of a window create patterns on a wall in Salzburg, Austria

Although we did not actually stay in Salzburg during out July 2013 travels, we managed to end up there on four of our 7 days in Bavaria. Our trail from Heidelberg arrived in Salzburg and our return train departed here. On a couple of other days we were traveling around the area to visit various features not far from Salzburg, so we ended up there for a few hours – on two occasions having a late lunch, taking part in Salzburg’s “coffee culture,” and then wandering around. We did see some of the main tourist places, such as the square near the Salzburg Cathedral, the castle, and the narrow and bustling (and a bit uncomfortably commercial) streets of the old downtown, but we also managed to walk through a few less busy areas.

Some of these walks took us through some very narrow and old streets between the main part of old Salzburg and the outlying area where we parked. Here the buildings sit right up against the streets, and the streets themselves were obviously constructed in a pre-automobile era since they are barely a single car wide. Many things intrigued me about these narrow streets beside their mere narrowness: the various muted colors of the buildings, the ways the streets twist and turn and come together at odd angles, the interesting way that the light played on the scene as it came down from far above or shone down street that aligned with the sun, and some of the architectural features such as the windows and the interesting metal street lights that seemed to be everywhere. In this photograph the sun was rather high in the sky but almost in line with the street, and the image of the shadows of the open windows almost mirrors the fainter pattern of the reflections from the glass.

Photographs: Abstract, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Textures, Photographs: Urban/Street

My Kitchen Window

June 4, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The view through blinds hanging outside my kitchen window.

Yup. My kitchen window. Why, you might wonder, did I make this photograph? I think there might be three reasons.

First, I’ve often said that I believe that I can find something to photograph within a few feet of anyplace I might find myself. A few photographer friends could tell you stories about me shooting from basically one spot for, on occasion, hours. Right now I’m recalling a meeting with a friend in Death Valley. We went to photograph a beautiful canyon area that I had overlooked and which she wanted to show me. We set up to shoot – I was on top of a small rise. As she ran around discovering this and that and the other fascinating thing, I continued to shoot from my original spot, perhaps for as long as an hour. It’s not that I don’t like to move. I can hike as well as the next photographer. But sometimes I can find so much in a small area that I don’t want to move. And I sure didn’t have to move much at all for this shot. I didn’t even have to leave the house!

Second, and speaking of house, there is a bit of a tradition among some photographers of making photographs in their immediately living environment. Here I’m thinking of a post from, if I recall, Cole Weston that I saw recently in which he shared photographs from seemingly mundane places… including his house and maybe even his bedroom. I believe that Huntington Witherill made the initial photographs for many of his beautiful digital manipulations of flowers in a spot in his home. And on and on. So, what the heck, a shot from my home. (Compared to these other photographers, I have to admit that my “home-grown” photographs have a way to go!)

Third, I had a new camera and I was anxious to try it out. The camera is a bit of a departure from the gear I usually use. (Typically I shoot with a full-frame DSLR system.) Because of some situations in which I want to travel and shoot light and fast, I decided to pick up a Fujifilm X-E1 along with a small set of lenses. This is a small mirrorless “rangefinder style” camera with similarly small lenses. (You can read more about the camera and my initial impressions here: “Fujifilm X-E1: From DSLR to Mirrorless. Hint: I like it.”) So this was probably just about the first photograph I made with that camera.

Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Structures and Objects

Window and Rusted Chimney

March 21, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Detail of the outside wall of a dilapidated wooden building with a window and a rusted metal chimney, China Camp, California

During the first weekend of 2013 I joined a bunch of Bay Area photographers who were taking part in a “long exposure photo walk,” shooting with this group at dawn near the Golden Gate Bridge and then later in the morning at this historic location. China Camp was, as I understand it, a shrimp fishing village established on the shoreline of the northern San Francisco Bay in the 1800s by immigrants from China. It has long since been abandoned and now is part of a California state park. It seems mostly like a place of quiet and solitude these days, and the most common sounds during my visit were the cries of shore birds.

A few buildings, some apparently reconstructed or restored, remain from the original village. They sit right along the shoreline in a shallow cove with an open view across the northern bay. I had beautiful soft light on this visit, as a Pacific winter storm was just beginning to clear, leaving it its wake plenty of atmospheric moisture and cloudiness. I photographed the very weathered side of this building as that light vacillated between cloudy gray and nearly full sun, catching this shot as some sun shone through, though softened a bit by the clouds.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: window

Pipes, Window, Stucco Wall, and Shadows

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Window Shadows and Reflections

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My Kitchen Window

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Window and Rusted Chimney

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

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