Night Vision

Go beyond picture-postcard cityscapes with our essential guide to five fun photo projects you can try in a single evening

Discover five creative ways to shoot the city at night for a fresh take on even the most familiar urban landscapes

Towns and cities arguably look at their best – their most inviting and exciting

– at night. Of course, it’s perfectly possible to shoot stunning cityscapes during the day, too, but unless the light is just right, and from just the right direction, it’s often hard to do a city justice in a photograph; an iconic skyline against a deep blue sky that’s dotted with crisp white clouds is fine for postcards, but let’s face it, it’s not exactly creative.

The advantage of shooting at night, of course, is that you don’t have to worry as much about the light, or indeed the weather. The sort of deep, dusky blue skies you get up to an hour after sunset on clear evenings are arguably the ideal for cityscapes at night, but you can still get amazing results even if it’s completely overcast and pouring with rain, which is more than can be said for photographing cityscapes in the daytime.

Shooting at night will improve your cityscapes… well, overnight, but you don’t have to stop there. By thinking creatively, it’s possible to go even further with your images to capture something more exciting and original. All it needs is some creative vision.

To help get your started, over the next ten pages we present five ideas for classic cityscapes at night, and then, for each, provide a step-by-step guide to a fresh or creative twist that will help take your own nightscapes to the next level. And remember, our suggestions are just that: suggestions. For every cityscape, there are dozens of different ways to shoot it, and the results you come home with are limited only by your imagination…