Tag Archives: window

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Travel, Photographs: Urban/Street

Storefront, Two Men

Image November 12, 2022 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Switching gears again today, this is another photograph from our October East Coast visit. The trip was primarily to photograph autumn color in New England, but we managed to spend a couple of nights in Manhattan before our homeward flight. Our visit coincided with what New York still refers to as the “Columbus Day Parade,” though the more modern designation is apparently also along the lines of Italian Heritage Day. (One bizarrely noteworthy moment was seeing Rudy Giuliani yucking it up on one of the floats, but I digress…) We wandered around the periphery of the parade route, where the onlookers were often more fascinating than the parade itself.

I made this photograph using one of my “blind shooting” techniques. There are lots of different thoughts about how street photographers should (or should not) interact with their subjects, and I think they all have some validity. Here I did not want the subjects to be distracted by me, so I held the camera in front of me as I walked by and made a couple of exposures without looking directly at the two men. I think it paid off. I feel like there are a number of ways to try to make sense of what is going on in the scene and what it might imply, but I’ll leave it to viewers to figure this out.

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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” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him.
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Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

Free Beans

Image October 9, 2022 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A very worn, largely illegible, and graffiti-covered sign on a Manhattan business.

We don’t know if they are good beans, but at least they are free, or so we are led to believe. This window, made opaque, was under scaffolding that covered a sidewalk next to the building in Manhattan. Such scaffolding seems ubiquitous to me. I can’t vouch for this, but I was told by someone who should know about such things that the scaffolding contractors like to leave the stuff up since it is less expensive than moving it and warehousing it!

This kind of forgotten urban detritus fascinates me. At some point in the past, someone must have put some thought into the signage, determining which colors to use, what size fonts to use for different text, and aligning those yellow lines that divide it into sections. But neglect, weather, and graffiti have done their work, and today it is hard to even figure out what the sign is about.

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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

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

Looking In

Image May 17, 2022 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

We were at this location to photograph flowers, but I almost always keep an eye out for other subjects besides the one I came for. This large public garden is centered around a historic mansion, and at times I found the old building to be as interesting as the flowers that were my object. I noticed that the outer screen didn’t quite close all the way, and then I noticed that a warm lamp was barely visible inside the building. Looking in at the warmly lit interior scene, as vague as it is, evokes memories of such places in the winter.

This is one of those photographs that —once again! — proves the point that we often do not expose for some compromise, straight-out-of-camera shot. instead, I like to think about what exposure will give me the image data that I can use to in post to produce an image that is true to what I saw. Here I had to control the brightness of the exterior — which was fortunately muted a bit as the sun passed behind some clouds —while getting enough of an image in the dark and subtle interior that I could work with it in post.

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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” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him. Blog | Bluesky | Mastodon | Substack Notes | Flickr | Email

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

Breakfast, Manhattan, December 2021

Image February 8, 2022 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Breakfast on the window sill, Manhattan, December 2021.

On one level this is a photograph of a half-eaten breakfast roll on the paper bag it was packed in, sitting on the window sill of a Manhattan hotel room on a cloudy winter morning. We can look at it as a little still life, I suppose, though perhaps a less appealing one than the traditional images of fruit and such. But there’s a story behind it.

For us a typical Manhattan breakfast might be coffee and pastry picked up somewhere on the street or, if we had the time and inclination, a “real breakfast” with eggs and more in a restaurant somewhere. (We follow a “two-and-a-half-meals-per-day plan when traveling, where the half meal could be morning or midday and is usually espresso plus something small.) But this visit was during the start of the Manhattan holiday omicron surge — what a strange description! — and those crowded little restaurants and shops were not so appealing. Fortunately, the Mille-Feuille Bakery was on the ground level of our hotel, so we’d head down there, pick something up, and return to our room… where the morning ritual was to start the covid rapid test, then sip coffee and eat pastry while the 15 minutes passed.

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