Tag Archives: pipes

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature

Near Keane Wonder Mine

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Near Keane Wonder Mine
Rugged terrarin near the Keane Wonder Mine, Death Valley.

Near Keane Wonder Mine. © Copyright 2023 G Dan Mitchell.

Rugged terrarin near the Keane Wonder Mine, Death Valley.

One morning on my recent photographic Death Valley trip I headed up the road from the Valley toward Beatty, Nevada. I didn’t plan to actually go to Beatty, butI wanted to learn a bit more about the closure of part of the read between the park and Beatty, to photograph some large-scale vistas, and perhaps to check out the area near the Keane Wonder Mine. I knew that the latter was closed for restoration work, but I thought I might be able to at least get close to it. It turned out that this was not the case, so I decided to photograph the landscape near the mine from a distance.

The mine was one of the more productive in Death Valley during the 1900s. Its works are extensive, and a lot of remnants are still there. (For years it was closed off due to safety concerns, but access was again permitted a few years agp.) Much of the area in the photograph is more or less natural landscape, but a closer look reveals tailings, the remains of a long pipe system that likely supplied water, and some other evidence of mining.

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: Night, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Structures and Objects

Industrial Building, Mixed Lighting

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Industrial Building, Mixed Lighting
Industrial Building, Mixed Lighting

Industrial Building, Mixed Lighting. Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, Vallejo, California. April 5, 2013. © Copyright 2014 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Numerous sources of artificial light illuminate an industrial building from outside and inside

I like night photography for a number of reasons. I enjoy the very slow work, finding subjects and compositions in near darkness and then waiting patiently for long exposures to complete. “Normal” photography can be a slow and meditative process, but night photography must be. Given so much time to stand and wait, I cannot help but notice the stillness and quiet of the night, and to feel the cool and damp air. In fact, as a person who does night photography, these things are almost as much part of the experience as the visual elements.

In the visual context, there are a few things about the appeal of night photography that might not occur to a person who has not done it. When photographing in very low light, what we photograph is often very different from what we actually see. Often the subject is quite dark, even when lit by the moon or nearby lights, but the camera doesn’t care—a long enough exposure can collect more light that our eyes can, and a dim and drab subject can become bright. Also, the illusion that the camera stops time is not quite so strong when photographing at night. Over the course of a many minutes long exposure stars move, lights of cars appear and pass, clouds blur into soft streaks, and the edges of shadows from moonlight blur. In industrial areas such as this one, the lighting is a mixture of things glowing from within and lit from without, and the diversity of lighting—tungsten, fluorescent, sodium vapor, LED, mercury vapor, moonlight—paints the nightscape with wild colors. This building is an excellent example. The upper windows emanate a glow from yellow interior light. Relatively colorless light hits the upper walls, but the light takes on an odd blue/pink tone on the lower building, and the shadows head toward blue.

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

Shadow on Door 4

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Shadow on Door 4
Shadow on Door 4

Shadow on Door 4. Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, Vallejo, California. April 5, 2014. © Copyright 2014 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A night scene from the historic Mare Island Naval Ship Yard

This is another night photograph from the historic Mare Island Naval Shipyard near Vallejo, California. It is hard to explain what attracted me to this specific subject, though the photograph is one of a small series I shot of this wall and the white building. (A “series” of night photographs often comprises a small number of photographs, since it often takes many minutes to complete a single exposure.)

I began by photographing from a position far to the right, where there was a large puddle of reflecting water between my position and the two buildings, and then I worked my way around the scene to finally shoot it straight on. In addition to the water, I was intrigued by the color contrast between the salmon colored wall and the stark white shack in front of it. (Though, to be honest, in the near darkness I had to make some assumptions about what the colors might actually be!) This photograph contains a number of elements that are common at Mare Island, especially at night. The architecture itself is typical—mostly quite utilitarian, with many very large buildings that were constructed for ship-building industry. There are often exposed pipes and wires and other elements. It is common to see weathered paint and rust. Windows are everywhere, often comprising surprisingly extensive portions of the exterior walls. I’ve never asked anyone, but my assumption is that it was less expensive to “light” the interior naturally than to use artificial light to illuminate such large spaces. The photo also illustrates a much more modern feature. Not long ago, when I first photographed here, the lights were often quite colorful, including sodium vapor, tungsten, fluorescent, mercury, and more. This often produces wildly colorful images at night. But today, for energy efficiency reasons, neutral colored LED lighting is being installed everywhere, and the color balance is more like that of daylight.

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.
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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: Northern California, Photographs: Urban/Street

Pipes, Window, Stucco Wall, and Shadows

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Pipes, Window, Stucco Wall, and Shadows
Pipes, Window, Stucco Wall, and Shadows

Pipes, Window, Stucco Wall, and Shadows. San Jose, California. March 16, 2013. © Copyright 2013 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

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.

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

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.