City light guestblog

Today a very interesting guestblog about shooting cities.
I’m sure you gonna love this one.

City Light
First of all, I feel very priviliged to be given the opportunity to write this guest blog at Franks’ website. Thanks a lot!

All visitors of this website will know that photography is about the Quest for The Light. When thinking about cities, your best chances for finding The Light are dawn and dusk. Each with their own character: dawn for the best available natural light, and dusk for the often astonishing combination of city lights against a dark blue, red, or pink sky. I will now focus on dawn in cities.

I love wandering around in big cities, as there are always so many objects to capture creatively. Preferably, I’ll do that very early. Temperatures are nice in warm summers, not too many people around, and quite a chance to find The Light. I would like to share some of my learnings of my photo safaris.

First of all, what am I looking for? At dawn, it is very often catching the first sunrays. Street lights can do the job, as these lights in Madrid show. Or being thrilled on Piazza Navonne in Rome when the early sunbeams reflect on the marble buildings, casting beautiful indirect light on that famous (but still empty!) place.

Secondly, I love symmetries (on my website, I have a collection of symmetries). If you start looking, you’ll find them everywhere. Buildings, train stations (ideal for mixing with motion!), stairs, and so on. The bridge towards Castel Sant’ Angelo in Rome is a typical example: the sun has just started to shine (6 AM), and the streets are completely empty (while normally very, very crowded). Sometimes you must be lucky: the sky in the picture of Bruges is quite rare. But as you know: luck only comes when you are prepared! My last example of symmetry is my best selling microstock-image, of the fantastic Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan (the street lights are always on during the night, so they still are in the early morning!).

Another theme in the early morning is the awakening of the city. Beautifully lit streets can be the decor, but also the undergroud (pictures from Madrid and Munich, respectively).

I have been in the lucky situation of being able to vist many cities. After a while, you get a feel for what to look for and you develop a kind of specialization. That doesn’t mean that I now am constrained to making pictures of cities. When recently travelling trough some national parks in the USA, I took the image below with such rich colors. I just love photography, and not only cities!

If you are interested in my work, please visit my website or connect with my Facebook Fanpage. Thanks for reading!

Rob van Esch,
August 2012