The witching hour

Pick your moment when you shoot city lights: the best time is not in the middle of the night Cities take on a new identity after dark. And even if the weather has not been kind during the daylight hours, there is always the promise of great images during your evening excursions – particularly if you have packed your tripod. But don’t leave your night photography too late. The best time to shoot floodlit buildings and nightscapes is soon after dark, rather than in the dead of night. What you want to achieve is getting some colour in the sky, rather than ending with a completely black backdrop – and that’s a matter of timing.

In order to ensure that the sky is not too bright and that you can see the lights, you do need to wait until after sunset, of course. But what you are waiting for is the perfect time, sometime between civic and nautical twilight, when the sky will still record as blue in your images and create a coloured backdrop to the lights. This happens sooner the nearer you are to the equator, and the nearer you are to the winter solstice. The sky often looks black to the eye even if it doesn’t in the camera’s long exposure, so you need to take images to check you have the perfect shade of blue.