I just was alerted that B&H has a 24 hour-only$50 off on Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5 sale. It is available for both Mac and Windows. If you have been waiting, this might be a good opportunity to act!
NOTE: There was a problem with this link when I first posted it, but it should work now.
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
Bicycles parked against the wall of a building of the Heidelberg University, Germany
There are many things that seem to characterize Heidelberg, especially the old portion of the town: the historic character of the buildings, the crowds of visitors, the university, the very young population, and the huge number of bicycles. A hint: it sees that the last three items in that list are related. It seems like everyone is riding a bicycle, the vast majority of which are similar sorts of very practical bikes, and not so much the racing bikes or mountain bikes that I tend to see in the US. Folks seem to use them to get everywhere – school, work, shopping, out to meet friends. Given this, it isn’t surprising that bicycles are also parked nearly everywhere, sometimes in huge numbers and other times in small groups, as in this photograph. (It took me a few close calls to figure out that there are bike lanes marked on some of the sidewalks in Heidelberg – I never did completely develop instincts for this while I was there.)
This group of the ubiquitous “work” bikes was parked outside a building belonging to Heidelberg University. The bikes themselves often seem interesting to me, but this little scene was also full of the sorts of features and details that always attract my attention – the colorful patterns of the building, along with its geometrical shapes, the cobbled street and sidewalk with rows of stones leading toward the entry door and the curve of the lighter stones separating sidewalk and street.
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 man walks into the sun in front of a blue building, San Francisco, California
This building is, indeed, very blue. I passed it in the low angle morning light shortly after getting off the Caltrain and starting to walk up into the City. The area along Fourth Street seems to change each time I visit and the balance between very funky old businesses and so forth versus newer and slightly hipper stuff continues to shift toward the latter. I’m not sure what this building is, but I’m pretty certain that it is no longer some sort of garage or mechanical shop.
The first thing that caught my attention about this building was, no surprise, the blue color. I thought about how I could arrange the components of the shot to include only blue and white elements, but given the lens I was working with and a few other factors, that wasn’t possible – so there is a bit of brick wall at the upper right intruding into the blue sky. I’m starting to like it. Two other things that I saw here were the angled shadow and the trash collection bins. The two of them and the square shadow on the roll-up door seem to create a sort of pattern, and the walking person – also in a dark jacket and with a shadow, seems to bisect the space between the far right shadow and the middle bin. Without the figure, the shot didn’t seem all that interesting to me, so I employed a technique I often use when shooting urban subjects like this: compose and wait for something/someone to walk into the frame.
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
Vertical format black and white photograph of light streaming through the upper reaches of the turret skylight above the atrium at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
This is a second photograph made during a recent visit to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, or SFMOMA, on the weekend before the place closed for two years of renovation and expansion work. Only days before did I realize that it was about to close and the extraordinary length of the closure, and I quickly adjusted my plans to get up there one more time. I wanted to wander the facility itself, but I especially wanted to see the excellent exhibit of the work of photographer Garry Winogrand.
This skylight is a dominant feature when the museum exterior is viewed from the west, where its tilted and round shape stands out from almost anything else nearby. Inside the building it creates a wonderful space full of light that somehow seems intimate, even though it is the highest point in a very large lobby atrium. The small diameter of the space and the walkway that splits it in two probably contribute to this effect. This photograph is a highly interpreted or stylized view of the subject, and is the result of a great deal of work in post-production – which almost seems somewhat ironic since the photograph was made handheld with a very small rangefinder style mirrorless digital camera.
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 whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
