G Dan Mitchell Photograph: Outside The Vesuvio Cafe

A lone man stands outside the entrace to a cafe in a graffiti-covered San Francisco alley at night.

The end of Daylight Savings Time — which I look forward to every year! — opens up additional night opportunities for me, especially with it comes to night street photography. I live close enough to San Francisco that I can get there and back by rail, which is a better option in most cases than driving, provided that I can return before it gets too late. Now that the sun is setting at close to 5:00 PM I have time to photograph twilight and early darkness — typically the best time for this sort of photography — and still catch a reasonably early train back home.

This week I took advantage of this change for the first time this fall, heading up to The City to arrive there in the early afternoon, photographing for a few hours in daylight (albeit muted by fog), and then sticking around as day changed to night. Photographing in such a location is almost visually overwhelming. There are details everywhere — people, shops, passing traffic, buildings, and more — and it can be hard to make visual sense out of them. On top of that, everything is in a constant state of flux, so there is often little time to carefully consider a photography. Instead, one operates by instinct, working quickly and knowing that only a small percentage of exposures will be worthwhile. As I walked up toward the North Beach area I looked up an alley and spotted this fellow standing alone in this graffiti-covered alley as the artificial lighting began to supplant the natural light.

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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