15 Tips for Better City Photography

Hello. So, in this video, I'm going to give you some nice simple, but quite effective tips on how to photograph a city. And this video is sponsored by Hasselblad, because they sent me an X2D II camera with a 35-100 mm lens, which is quite frankly brilliant. Uh and I'll be using it for all the shots in this video. But we'll talk more about the camera towards the end of the video, because I've had a — slightly cheeky idea for a project. It's based on the city of Bath, which is where I live. — And it's kind of a dark twist on those coffee table books of cities that you get. But we'll get to that in time. Firstly, here are 15 tips on how to photograph a city. Number one, plan your shots. — So, I was wandering around scouting for locations, and I took this shot of Bath's iconic Pulteney Bridge. It's a beautiful piece of architecture, but the shot itself is a bit meh. It's just I mean, it's fine. Uh but the lighting is dull, and the water looks dull, and there's all these people up here. So, with some planning, I came back and I took this shot, which has a lot more atmosphere and vibrancy to it. Because the day when I was initially out was overcast, and the stone used in Bath for all the buildings looks very beige and bland in overcast light. But in low sunlight, it looks golden. And I wanted that golden look of the stone against a solid blue sky, cuz blue and orange are complementary colors. They're opposite each other on the color wheel. And this means the architecture will have a good contrast to the sky. And it also means that the shot has the potential to be a lot more colorful. So, I looked at the weather forecast, and I chose a day where the skies were blue and there were no clouds. I wanted to shoot with the sun low, and I wanted the light to be hitting the front of the bridge. So, I used this app, PhotoPills, which I highly recommend. There's lots in this app, but all you really need for most types of photography is the planner. You drop a pin in the map. I was about here, — and you have these two thin lines here. The yellow represents the direction of the sunlight, and the blue is moonlight. It tells you at the top when blue hour and golden hour are in the morning and in the evening, because these happen twice a day. And down at the bottom here, you can scroll through the time and to see where the position of the sun and the moon will be at any given time. I wanted to shoot at golden hour, but I can see that the sun is hitting the front of the bridge in the morning golden hour. So, I cycled down to town at around 6:30 a. m. to catch the sunlight hitting the right side of the bridge, the front. And what was good about this as well, was being out so early meant the town had very, very few people in it. I wanted the shot to feel very still. So, I brought an ND 1000 filter to stick on front of the lens. That's a neutral density filter that reduces the light coming into the lens by 1000 times. And that meant that I could expose the sensor for several minutes — to get the water looking really smooth and glassy. When you're planning a shot, you should think about locations, weather, time of day, the types of shots you want to take, and do be patient. Don't compromise your shots because you can't be bothered to wait for something to move or light to hit a certain point. If you put the effort in, it will pay off, and you will be grateful that you did. Number two, consider whether you want people in your city shots. Cuz having shots will give your shots I'll give them an authenticity and also an an energy, cuz people help show how a place truly is. It makes it feel vibrant, and it can give a sense of scale to buildings and streets as well. Having no people will help your viewer focus on the architecture, and it'll make the shots feel less cluttered and more focused. But it can also help make your shots feel less dated and make them a bit more timeless. Cuz spaces without people can convey a sense of stillness and calmness, and conceptually, that can also suggest an — absence or an isolation, or even a way of critiquing how we inhabit urban spaces. Photographer Eugène Atget photographed the streets of Paris in the early 1900s, and he used a dry plate process, which meant the exposures had to be quite long. And because they were so long, anyone moving through the scene simply disappeared. — So, what should have been a bustling capital city instead looks strangely deserted. And that emptiness gives his images a slightly unsettling quality. If you want to shoot busy places without people, there are four ways to achieve this effect. The first one is long exposure, because like Eugène Atget, when you leave the shutter open for several minutes, people in motion often — don't remain in the frame long enough to register in the photograph at all. The result is that even a busy area can appear completely empty of people

provided that they're moving through rather than lingering in front of your lens. And this works best when you're shooting from a slightly elevated angle looking down, or in locations where people don't spend too much time blocking the background. — Ultimately, it kind of depends on how people are using the space. The second option is to take multiple photos and composite them. — So, this method involves capturing a series of images from the same position, and then combining them to remove people. Let me show you how this works. So, I'll be using Lightroom and Photoshop here, but the same principles should apply across any editing software. So, firstly, I'm going to retouch the image the way I want it, and I'm going to sync those settings across all the other images. So, here I'll just add my portrait 160 preset, and maybe pull the shadows up a little bit, I think. That works for me. So, now I'm going to shift-click to the end — and click sync, and I'm going to synchronize everything. And if you're using Lightroom, and you've had any setting on your camera set to automatic, the exposure might change. So, what you want to do is this clever little thing called match total exposure. So, you go to settings, and then match total exposure. This clever tool, it looks at your EXIF data, things like ISO, shutter speed, aperture, and it adjusts the exposure um of the rest of the images to match. And as long as the ambient light hasn't changed, you'll get a fairly even exposure across all your images. So, I've shot this busy kind of interchange here, and it's just always busy. And what I want to do is remove all the cars, all the people, and I want to turn the traffic lights off. So, you want to try and edit this down to as few images as you need. So, I've now selected those, and I'm going to right-click them and go edit in, and then open as layers in Photoshop. So, here we are in Photoshop, and we've got these as layers here. If you've shot this handheld, you'll want to select all of the layers and go to edit, auto align layers, and it should automatically rotate, rescale everything, and just line them all up. So, now I'm going to select each layer, and I'm going to option or alt-click a mask on each one like this. So, we've got all these layers, and the black mask means that layer isn't showing at all, because black doesn't show and white does show. Think of it like light. If light is shining on that layer, you can see it. If it's in darkness, you can't. So, what we want to get is a brush, press D, and your colors should default. You can press X to switch between them. You can hold control and option or control and alt to change your brush size by going left and right, and the hardness by going up and down. I think we want something around here. So, first off, we're just going to remove all the bits that we don't want. So, we're going to remove her. I'll make sure your flow is up to 100%. More people there. — So, I'm going to get to the next layer up, and I'm going to paint white onto the mask of that layer, hopefully revealing the empty background where that person or car has moved. If there is something on that layer in the same place, I'll go to the next layer up again, and I'll keep doing this until everything in the scene has gone, including all the illuminated lights on the traffic lights, so they should appear to be completely switched off. And there we go. We have an image without any people or cars in it. The third method is Photoshop cloning. So, this is the weakest method of removing people, and ideally, you'll want to rely on this as little as possible. If you do have to turn to Photoshop tools, the cloning and healing brushes work the best. So, AI can be tempting, but at the moment, it doesn't do a great job, cuz it's got no idea actually what's behind someone, so it just makes something up. And it often doesn't match the grain and the resolution of the photo properly. That said, it is there if you need it. And if you've already done most of the work with the other methods, and there are just a couple of stray bits left in the frame, cloning and AI can really be a lifesaver. But the fourth method, the final method in this list, is by far the best, and it produces flawless results. Okay, number four, get up early. That's it. — Simple. Even in the busiest cities, you'll find the streets almost empty at around 5:30 a. m. A few people, sure, but nothing you can't work around. If you can nail it in camera, it always looks better than trying to fix it afterwards. Number three, it's all about light. So, you've already seen how photo of Pulteney Bridge completely changes depending on the light. And to show you just how much difference it makes, here

are four shots I took of this old pump station, all at different times of the day, all in different conditions. For this first one was taken in mid-afternoon sun. The light's harsh, it's direct, and it creates these sort of bright, blown-out highlights and very deep shadows. This second image was taken in the early morning. It's under overcast skies, and the clouds here act like a giant softbox. So, you get this very flat, even light. It's not always the most exciting choice for cityscapes. The third one, this was taken during golden hour, that time just after sunrise or just before sunset. The sun's low in the sky, and you get that warm, soft light and these beautifully long shadows. This one was around 7:00 p. m. The sun was setting behind the building. What I hadn't planned for was that I had a big glass building opposite, and the sunlight was bouncing off and creating these patterns on the old stonework. It had this lovely reflected glow. This is a good reminder that no matter how much you plan, there are always these little serendipitous moments that you can take advantage of. And finally, this last one, this was taken at blue hour. Des- Despite the name, it only lasts for about 15 minutes. It's blue 15 minutes. It's a brief window after the sun has set where the street lights come on, but the sky still has color in it. It's not yet black. And so, you get this deep, rich sort of blue or purple in the sky, and it makes a very atmospheric, but still quite vibrant city photos. It's worth coming back to get the best light for a situation where you can. It's that little extra push that makes your shots stand out from the crowd. So, I framed up this shot of uh Bath Abbey through this archway here. It's sort of a frame in a frame thing, and it's fine, but the weather was overcast. So, I came back at golden hour, and the scene was in shadow except for the top of the Abbey, which was just being hit by the sun. And I think that makes for just a slightly nicer shot. Number four, compress perspectives with longer focal lengths. So, while a wide lens might feel like the obvious choice for city photography, as it lets you capture — big, sweeping views and squeeze in those big buildings, it's not always the most effective way to show character. Longer focal lengths can do something really interesting. They can compress perspective. During my project of Bath, because Bath is a very hilly city, if you shoot it with a wide lens, those hills tend to flatten out a bit, and everything feels — further apart than it really is, and you lose that sense of steepness. But if you switch to a longer focal length, you can exaggerate the rise and the fall of the streets. — For example, this is a shot here I took of a steep road, taken at the wide end of my 35 to 100 mm lens. And if you compare it to this one, which was taken at the telephoto end, you can really see how much more dramatic view that hill is emphasized. I'd argue this actually gives a much truer sense of how this city feels when you're here. Different focal lengths change how a cityscape is read. The wide focal lengths, they use them to show scale, and longer ones emphasize shape. Number five, use long exposure. Long exposure, as I showed earlier, is a really nice tool for city photography, because it lets you see the city in a way that we can't see with our own eyes. And the results don't always have to scream long exposure. Sometimes it can just be very subtle. It can be just smoothing out some movement or softening the light slightly. Although, you can also make it a bold feature of your images. — Alexey Titarenko used long exposure in a really interesting way in his project City of Shadows. He photographed all these crowds of commuters on his Hasselblad, turning them into a ghostly river of blurred figures. And in capturing this strange, ethereal movement, he really conveys what I imagine to be the mood of the time, a dark sense of anonymity and despair, because it was all shot during the collapse of the Soviet Union. And on a more practical level, you can use long exposure to bring energy to your photos with light trails from cars. You can smooth out rivers and canals and fountains, or you can remove people, like I've spoken about earlier. It lets you have creative control over time. It lets you decide whether the city feels fast and alive or calm or haunting or surreal. Because sometimes city photography is about capturing the feeling of a place as much as showing how it looks. Number six, layer your images. This one's pretty basic, pretty clichéd, but it's clichéd because it works. Layer your photos with foreground and background elements. — Use leading lines. Leading lines are one of the simplest and most effective compositional techniques. They just

naturally guide the viewer's eye into the frame and towards your subject. Take this old pump station, for example. From where I'm standing, the cobbled road does lead up to it, and that works fine. But if I shift just a meter to the right, this curve of the pavement creates a much stronger line that sweeps the viewer straight into the shot and towards the building. Shooting three things is another great way to add depth to your photos, using a frame within a frame, like an archway, mirrors, tree branches, gaps between elements in the landscape. This can help draw attention to your subjects, whilst also giving the image a stronger sense of space. Number seven, composite different elements. When you're putting a lot of care into a shot, don't be afraid to mix multiple exposures together. I've already touched on this with removing people, but it's just as useful in other situations. For example, if you're using long exposures, you might love the smooth, glassy look of water, but if the breeze is just slightly moving the trees, they can turn into a bit of a blurry mess. And in that case, you can combine a long exposure of the water with a sharp, faster exposure of the trees to get the best of both worlds. Number eight, still on compositing, composite panoramas. You can use multiple shots to capture a wider field of view, which is perfect for panoramas. For example, this shot is a street in Bath called The Circus. It's a complete circle of Georgian houses. But my 35 to 100 mm lens wasn't quite wide enough to fit it all in one frame. So, instead, I took eight overlapping shots, and I stitched them together in Lightroom. This process is really very simple. You just select all the images, you right-click, go to photo merge, panorama, and Lightroom will preview it. — You can tweak the settings until you're happy, and then click merge, and it will create a brand new raw file that you can edit as normal. One bonus of doing this is amazing resolution, because instead of being limited by a single frame, you're effectively building a super high-res image in different pieces. So, using my 100 megapixel Hasselblad X2D II, um all these shots stitched together gave me something closer to an 800 megapixel image, which is frankly ridiculous. It's also brilliant if you want to make massive prints. Number nine, remove distractions. One of the core principles of photography is to minimize anything that pulls attention away from the main subject of your image. Things like chewing gum on the pavement, graffiti, litter, brightly colored signs, even like a bin in the corner of the frame. They All these things can compete with your main subject, and it can weaken your image. And the best time to deal with these things is in camera. You can change your position, reframe your shot. You can uh move yourself so things are hidden behind foreground elements. If it's something small and movable, you can actually just go in and shift it out of the way. Sometimes, of course, there are things that you just can't avoid. You can always tidy them up in post-production if you have to. Sometimes, you just need to do a bit of thinking. Cuz I was trying to take this shot of Bath's Royal Crescent, but it was always packed with these parked cars, uh which kind of ruins it a bit. But I found if I went down into the park in front of it, and I got down low, — I could obscure the cars with the camber of the ground. So, the key is to train yourself to notice these details when you're out shooting, and to find ways to hide them. Because fewer distractions you allow in the frame, the stronger and more focused your image will feel. — Number 10, go abstract. So, you don't need to go fully abstract. — Your photos can be still recognizable scenes. But what I mean is that their impact can be derived from abstract principles. So, focus on shadows and reflections and colors and the way shapes and tones interact, rather than thinking about capturing a literal subject. Saul Leiter was a master of this. He often shot through misty windows. He layered his frames. He contrasted bold colors to create images that felt really painterly and atmospheric. And even photographers like Robert Adams, whose work is a lot more figurative, structure his images around these abstract principles. His seemingly simple scenes rely on a of rhythm and proportion and the interplay of light and shadow. And this method of composition can make even ordinary subjects very visually compelling. So, don't just think about what's in your

frame, think about the visual impact of the frame itself. Look for symmetry, repetition, strong geometric elements. Don't be afraid to experiment. Think of your frame in terms of tone and shape and color. Number 11, I have that I have 11 fingers, luckily. Look for humorous or quirky juxtaposition. Another way to approach city photography is to play with the unexpected relationships between different elements that you may find in a scene. And this can take many different forms cuz you got photographers like Matt Stuart who's developed a keen sense of observation and create images that are very playful and often just outright funny. But it doesn't need to be that obvious. You can make it more subtle. Compositions where shapes or lines or colors just visually align in a satisfying way. — The key is to keep your eyes open for contrasts. Look for like the old and the new together, intentional and unintentional, the serious and the absurd. Look for things out of place. Clever observations can make your images very memorable. — Number 12, get whole buildings in the frame. So, you don't have to do this all the time, but sometimes it is worth capturing an entire building rather than cropping it. If you can fit the structure fully in your frame, your image can feel a bit cleaner and calmer and it feels like there's space to breathe. Now, this approach works well as a contrast to maybe busier or more frenetic or chaotic city shots. And having a balance of both can make your images seem like they're an intentional set. They can feel a bit more balanced. Number 13, dodge and burn. This is the most important and most overlooked aspect of retouching that I see lacking in amateur work. It's a technique as old as photography itself. Without it, photographers like Ansel Adams wouldn't have made anywhere near the impact they did. But these days, dodging and burning is a much more sophisticated process than it was back in the darkroom days. You can select very accurate areas now. There's a whole host of tweaks you can do to make something more noticeable or less noticeable. play with shadows, highlights, contrast, sharpness, clarity, dehaze, saturation. There's so many techniques you can employ to just subtly draw your eye away from certain areas in your image or towards other ones. And subtlety really is the key here. If you can see you've done it, you've done it wrong. Dodge and burn, take a break, come back with fresh eyes, evaluate your edit. So, while in programs like Lightroom, you can select people, you can select landscape elements, you can do things like select the sky, buildings, foliage in very specific ways now. It's still often a good technique to simply just use a soft round brush or a smooth gradient or vignettes. Of course, what you can get right at the time is the best thing. You can't dodge and burn a bad shot into a good one. You need to wait for the time the sun is hitting the bits that you want to illuminate. But dodging and burning can help you just bring that out a little bit more in your final edit. Number 14, trust your gut. So, I'm giving you all these rules, but ultimately, you need to trust what feels right. Cuz rules are great. They give you a starting point. But if you feel something works, just then forget technique, forget rules, forget what should work, forget how much work you've put into something. Just follow your instinct. Number 15, think about concept. Cuz if you want your city photography to stand out, it helps to approach it with a concept or a project in mind. So, ask yourself, what can I do differently? Think about what you shoot, when you shoot it, how you shoot it, and why you're shooting it. Having a concept in mind can help give your images a cohesion. It can turn a series of city photos into something that's more like a body of work, maybe one that tells a story or explores an idea. And that leads me nicely onto the project that I've been working on, the one I've been shooting with the X2D II and the 35 to 100 mil lens. It's basically a project about Bath, the city I live in. Cuz Bath is beautiful, it's historic, it's very touristy. It's one of the most visited cities in the UK. It gets hundreds of thousands of tourists visiting every year due to places like the Roman Baths, Bath Abbey, the Royal Crescent, Pulteney Bridge, all the Georgian architecture, all the locations they filmed Bridgerton, all the places they filmed things like Wonka, and basically every other period drama you can think of. Honestly, it's like living

in a film set sometimes. But it gets very crowded, basically. So, when the city empties in the evening, it takes on this very different feeling. So, golden hour light kind of floods the streets and the crowds leave and everything goes sort of still. And it feels always slightly wrong. — So, to borrow Freud's term, unheimlich, familiar and beautiful, yet subtly estranged from itself. And it's this mildly sort of unnerving stillness that I want to pursue. Because this project I'm building on a project on earlier work that I started a few videos ago. I started a project set in a park that I frequented as a child. And in that, I was sort of exploring atmospheres of eeriness and dislocation. And here, I want to push that a little further. I want to set up a deliberate tension. I want to create images with the surface qualities of a conventional coffee table style of photography of Bath, but laced with an undercurrent of unease. I'm going to do this by having no people and sort of no signs of life. All the lights off where possible, even traffic lights. Just enough so that the city feels a little bit too quiet. And I don't want it to be too overt. Just enough that a single image on its own sort of seems fine, but as a collective, the more you go through this potential book, the more wrong it feels. So, I think this should be shot at or at least appear to be shot at golden hour, uh the evening golden hour or twilight. I think the timing's pretty key because I want to capture that liminal time, that window of calm after the day's activities are finished, but with that feeling that night is soon kind of closing in. And as I said before, I'm going to go with my gut on this. I really need to feel my way through it. That's always a good way to pick images. Just go with your instinct. So, I'm going to talk about the Hasselblad gear now, and I want to preface this by saying that composition like concept, timing, all that stuff, it matters far more than any gear. Cuz some of the most striking images ever made were shot on very basic equipment. And I do believe this to my core. But yeah, I still wanted the X2D II. So, why is that? Well, it's because it's a massive oversimplification to say that a camera doesn't matter. Because a better camera can it can give you the look you want, it can make shooting easier, it can make some shots even possible. The key is that great photos come from vision and skill first, and the camera is a tool to help you realize that vision. And there's a reason that professionals like to use high-quality tools. There's a reason that Hasselblad is so highly regarded in the world of photography. And I'm not a tech reviewer, so I'm not going to go hard in and all the tech details. That would be disingenuous of me. But I am a photographer, so I'm going to go over the things that matter to me in real world use because I do genuinely absolutely love this camera. And — primarily, top of the list, image quality. Hasselblad's processing, Hasselblad's glass, the look just blows me away. It looks so medium format, and it's not about depth of field or anything like that. It's about this optical clarity that only a large sensor can give you. — And of course, with the 100 megapixel image size, you can crop into your images loads and no one would know. So, that's been actually quite useful when I've needed a longer lens. I wouldn't normally bother about stuff like IBIS and all that, but it's so good on this that you can do long exposures handheld. So, this one was a 3-second exposure. 6-second exposure. And believe it or not, there were actually people walking through the tunnel here. This just opens up so much opportunity when out shooting. You can get shots that you could previously only get with a tripod, but just shooting handheld. It has 1 TB of internal storage as well as the CFexpress type B card slot. Also, I've got mine set to back up. I want to use this to shoot professionally, and you need to be backing up your photos if you're shooting professionally. On the physical side of things, the user interface is just lovely. It's such a joy to use. It's so nicely designed. The screen is just — huge and bright and lovely. And um the addition of a joystick really helps. Um it's got more customizable buttons than before. The front wheel's clickable. Basically, everything's been very carefully thought through ergonomically. Every improvement works in a real world practical sense. But the big upgrade for me with this design is how the screen flips out. Because on the X2D, the screen tilted out, but the eyepiece was in the way. And I like shooting at waist level looking down. Um, — and that wasn't really practical with that one, but with the X2D II, the screen comes right out and goes completely horizontal. And also, you can tilt it down

so you could hold the camera up high and look down if you're shooting in a crowd or over a wall or something. The autofocus is a big step up from the X2D. It's not on the level of Sony or Canon full-frame latest camera, but that would be a very unfair comparison because this is a medium format, and for medium format, the continuous autofocus with eye and object tracking — working this well is unprecedented. But what this means in practice is that I would now be happy to use this on a demanding job like a wedding or something. — With the X2D, I would have been hesitant, but with the X2D II, I would be confident that I'd be able to keep up with moving subjects. And when it comes to the files, this is a bit of a paradox, really, because it has this amazing scope for working with images in post. You can pull so much detail out of the shadows and highlights, and there's so much you can do with the images in post, but also, Hasselblad gets it really right in camera. They come out of the camera looking pretty perfect, way more than any other camera I've ever used. So, they don't actually need that much editing. And with regards to the 35-100 mm zoom lens, I'm not typically a zoom shooter. I'm a prime lens shooter. I've always been happier with — primes. I don't know whether it's the way primes make me think or whether it's actually that they're — better lenses. As I get older, I find I'm wanting zoom lenses more for certain situations. And the answer to that age-old question, are primes or zooms, is the answer is really kind of both because they're suitable for different types of shots. Different lenses are suitable for different situations. Uh, like if I'm doing a prearranged portrait shoot or like a most kind of art shoots, I'm probably going to go with a prime lens, but if I'm wandering around a city and I'm going to need to keep changing my focal length, a zoom is probably better. Because it's got that wide telephoto range, it covers me for pretty much 99% of what I want to shoot. This lens, so it's got a it's 2. 8 f/2. 8 at the wide end and f/4 at the long end. It's a nice aperture. Um, if you're looking for a guide to depth of field, you got to think — don't compare it to a full-frame because the perceived depth of field is shallower. Um, you still get those portraits with a nice blurry background both wide and um, at 100 mil. It's apparently the fastest focusing of the XCD lenses available at the moment. Uh, so I could go into all the technical stuff, but in terms of images this thing kicks out, it's a very nice lens. The colors, the image definition, they're just perfect. Bokeh's nice. Um, it's a big lens, but it's not actually too heavy. If I could only have one lens for this system, I would choose this one. So, my final thoughts on the camera, if Hasselblad hadn't sent me these, I would like to buy them. This is my new camera of choice, and I am just using it all the time now. So, do let me know what you think about my city project idea. Is it a good idea for project? Is it too simple? Do the shots work? Let me know. Anyway, — I'll see you next time. —