A very worn and weathered Paris wall, plastered with flyers for the “Exposition Le Bikini.”
This is perhaps a bit of a whimsical photograph. As we walked through an older section of Paris back in 2016 we started coming upon lots of these posters. I assume that the event must have happened recently, as the flyers were worn but not so worn out that they couldn’t be read or seen.
I’m a sucker for worn and weathered surfaces, especially when they hold interesting shapes and forms and when there are layers of old “stuff” on the walls. If you look more closely at this you many find bits of old posters on top of bits of even older flyers.
Visitors to Griffith Observatory overlook Los Angeles twilight.
We were in Southern California over the Thanksgiving holiday, visiting our daughter and son-in-law. On the weekend we decided to head up to Los Angeles for various things, including a visit to the Frans Lanting show at the Annenberg Space for Photography. We finished up there, headed out for food (of course!) and then decided to head to Griffith Park.
We were apparently among approximately 350,000 people with the same idea! I’m not sure what a typical crowd looks like here, but this one was huge. We finally abandoned our rental car well below the observatory and found a shuttle bus that went up the hill. We arrived a bit before sunset and found that hordes were already there. But I can see why — it is a spectacular location. Although I was only carrying my “little camera,” I decided to see what I could come up with. Eventually I photographed the actual sunset, but first I turned the camera towards the people crowded onto the walkways around the observatory and standing in the beautiful light watching the evening develop.
A Utah juniper growing on red rock with the La Sal Mountains in the distance, Grand View overlook, Canyonlands National Park.
We had a great visit to Canyonlands National Park, though the lighting was challenging, to say the least. Our visit took us up to the “island in the sky” highlands and included a stop at the Dead Horse Point State Park. Initially, the light challenges were simply from the midday light and the fact that there was a certain amount of haze in the air. The haze can be a nice effect in some cases, but it can also obscure some of the longer views such as those from this high plateau. As the day wore on, clouds began to collect to the west and, as luck would have it, the thickest portion of the clouds were almost directly west of us. Ultimately, this interfered with my chances for dusk shooting, but sometimes that’s just the way it goes.
Before heading to the golden hour light location that I had selected, we drove down to the “Grand View” overlook – appropriately named, as anyone who has been there can confirm. Here the high plateau ends suddenly with a steep thousand foot drop off to the next lower level of strata and the Green River joins the Colorado in the vast and rugged terrain to the south. I did eventually make some photographs of that subject – it is sort of obligatory! However, as I walked to the overlook I saw to my left this chunk of cliff-edge sandstone with its resident juniper and remembered looking at it the last time I was there. The soft light produced by the overcast was a Good Thing here, as full sun would have produced a very harsh effect on the rocks. Beyond lies the giant valley of the Colorado River and even further out are the high and distant peaks of the La Sal mountains.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer 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
Black and white photograph of a rock garden of sandstone towers in morning light, backed by atmospheric haze and barely visible La Salle Mountains, Arches National Park
Black and white photograph of a rock garden of sandstone towers in morning light, backed by atmospheric haze and barely visible La Salle Mountains, Arches National Park.
So far, each time I’ve thought I was hitting the end of the photographs from my early April weeklong trip to Utah, I come up with another one… and another… and another. I still have a few more waiting to be posted, but those are photographs that I had already worked up but held off posting for one reason or another. This one, however, may be the final one to actually emerge from the collection of exposures from the trip. (But I make no promises! There is one more that features some reflected light inside alcoves in sandstone that still may work.)
This photographed ended up in black and white for several reasons. I was sort of leaning that direction when I made the exposure, since the color components of the scene were both difficult to work with and a bit less than exciting. In addition, I like the way that black and white can sometimes abstract the shapes of things, perhaps taking them a few degrees further from their “real” nature. I had stopped alongside the road between the Windows Area and Wall Street as I begin my exit from Arches National Park on my last morning of shooting there. There was a lot of haze, especially when looking into the light, as this photograph does. The backlit haze is thick enough that the snow- and forest-covered La Salle Mountains, which actually fill the upper part of the frame, all almost impossible to see, and the foreground features gradually lose contrast as they progress away from the camera. However, because the light is in front of the camera and coming from just out of the right side of the frame, the edges of the rock towers gain a bit of extra definition against that hazy background.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer 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
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.
