Children in Striped Hoodies. San Francisco, California. July 25, 2015. © Copyright 2015 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Two children in striped hoodies walk along a San Francisco street at night

This is yet another photograph that I don’t actually recall making! Sometimes when shooting street I think I work so quickly and spontaneously that I simple capture an image and move on to the next one without imbedding the specific experience in my memory. This almost certainly was one of those very quickly made photographs, and I only made two exposures of these subjects before moving on to something else.

There is a lot in this photograph, some of which I was likely considering in the moment when I made the photograph and some of which may have been more or less a happy accident. I’m pretty certain that I was attracted to the fact that the two kids were both wearing hoodies with horizontal stripes — perhaps someone’s mother or father had just gone shopping for the two of them? A wonderful bonus was the child on the right (big sister?) putting her arm gently on the shoulder of the other child — her younger brother? Then there are the other bits of color — the blue form on the left (which houses an automated carnival-like figure) and the wildly painted lamp-post on the right. And, yes, there is something a bit disconcerting about seeing two young children alone on the nighttime streets of a big city — at least to this photographer who brought up three such young children.

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.
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