In the world of stock photography, I find it useful to collect “portrait shots” of cities. By “portrait” I mean a single shot that sums up the place. Think of all of the list articles you see — “10 Best Cities for the Arts”, “12 Best College Towns”, etc. Often these articles will only feature one image per city, so they need that one shot that represents the place.
That’s what I tend to call a city portrait. A snapshot that conveys something unique about the place. If the city doesn’t have a landmark (like the Statue of Liberty or the St. Louis Arch) then I find that a skyline often fits the bill.
When I found myself with a free evening in San Diego a couple of years ago, I thought I’d take the opportunity to grab a city portrait. I looked at other images of San Diego and felt like the skylines that featured water helped to communicate that this is a coastal city. With that in mind, I took to Google maps and started looking for a good location from which to take my shot.
The area in the large circle above, is the downtown area that I wanted to focus on. The small circle across the water is the park that I felt might give a good across-the-water vantage point. Being a park, it made it an easily accessible spot to spend an hour or two as well.
I arrived at the park a little before sunset so that I could scout my location and find a composition before twilight. I ideally wanted to capture the city lights coming on while there was still some color in the sky.
This is the view that I was looking for. Now I just needed to wait for the sun to set and the light to be right. In the meantime, I took advantage of the sun’s last rays and the rising full moon to capture a few other unplanned images.
As twilight set in, I turned my camera back to my main composition and prepared for the city lights. It was about 25 minutes between the shot above and the one below, which is just what I was looking for with the balance of city lights and the purple sky that would soon fade to black:
