Bus Stop, San Francisco. July 15, 2011. © Copyright 2011 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A person sits at a bus stop in downtown San Francisco, California.

I made this photograph a year ago during one of my summer walks through downtown San Francisco. These walks have become a sort of tradition for me during this time of the year – I take the train into The City, arriving very early, and then head out on foot to photograph various areas, most of which I’ve visited a number of times. I prowl for several different sorts of subjects – the early morning light above the waterfront, people, bits of color and shape, and “architectural landscapes.”

Things can evolve very quickly in this urban environment. As I recall, the first thing that caught my attention here was the solitary figure on the bench, obscured by the semi-transparent material around the bus stop shelter, followed by the juxtapositions of yellow colors on its room and the sign across the street. The scene was incredibly busy, with people walking between me that the shelter, cars and buses passing by on the street, and people moving in and out of the frame on the other side of the street. So here, as I often do in such situations, I used what I might call the “compose and wait” approach – I found a composition around the shelter that centered the far widow and red sign in the opening… and then I waited for something interesting to appear in the right parts of the frame and for the distracting elements to disappear. I made perhaps a half-dozen or more exposures. In one, a bus passes through the frame. In another, blurred people appear in the foreground. But in this one, the person in dark clothes walked right in front of the red sign as another person emerged across the street to the left of the shelter, and no other people or vehicles interfered.

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.
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