Picture Perfect Bruges: How To Make Amazing Photos At Night
Quiet night on the canal lit by neon light in Bruges, Belgium.
Bruges is a picture perfect and culturally rich UNESCO World Heritage site. Here’s how to make amazing photos of Bruges at night.
Ensuring buildings and street scenes are illuminated and adjusting your camera's white balance, to produce the desired color rendition, is essential to how you’ll photograph Bruges at night. A tripod will ensure buildings are sharp while recording the movement of water and clouds in your photos.
If a tripod is not part of your camera kit then you’ll need to employ a high ISO to ensure the shutter speed is fast enough to prevent the likelihood of camera shake.
This will allow you to make sharp photos, though probably at the loss of impressionistic water reflections which require slower shutter speeds.
How To Make Amazing Photos Of The Canals Of Bruges At Night
I made the above photo during a long night exploring the old town of Bruges. Famous for it’s canals, Bruges is known as the Venice of the North. In it’s day Bruges was a major European trading hub.
Water provides great subject matter for photography. But at night, unless you’re looking to include negative space in your composition, it’s important to ensure the water course you’re photographing is illuminated.
As you can see I made use of the warm, incandescent light illuminating the stone bridge and reflecting back onto the river in my composition.
The orange colored light and a slow 1/2 second shutter speed produced the lovely, ethereal effect you see on the surface of the water.
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Picture Perfect Bruges At Night
Night photography, particularly in city environs, allows us to explore the colors emitted from a range of artificial light sources, including the following:
Street lights
Neon signs
Building interiors illuminated by fluorescent or incandescent lighting
Artificial lights generally emit colored light that can add mood and drama to a scene. On overcast nights the abundance of artificial light in the city can even illuminate the clouds above.
When I travel I don’t sleep all that much. There’s just so much to see and do. And the night offers so many fantastic opportunities for creative photography.
Historic walkway illuminated by artificial light at night in Bruges, Belgium.
Bruges Night Photography Adventure
Night photography offers the enthusiastic photographer a whole new range of opportunities to explore within the boundaries of the photographic frame.
Some of the emotions you’ll be able to explore during your night photography adventure in Bruges could include the following:
Stillness
Silence
Calm
Fear
Abandonment
Isolation
Transience
The night provides us with the opportunity to test our photography skills and explore places that crowds and traffic may not allow us to properly explore during daylight hours.
While busy during the day this historic walkway was completely absent of people when I photographed it illuminated by artificial light at night.
In this case I opted for a slightly greenish/orange color balance to suggest the possibility that something sinister was about to unfold.
Color is emotive and you should play with your camera’s white balance to influence the story your photo tells.
That way it has the potential to become so much more than a straight image documenting a particular architectural feature.
I continued to explore and photograph Bruges well into the night.
During my adventure that night it started to rain. I found shelter in a great pub and enjoyed a few of Belgium’s 300 odd beers, including a local beauty that made the trip back to my hotel particularly joyous.
A peaceful night scene depicting the Church Of Our Lady Bruges.
Night Photos Of Bruges That Explore The Beauty Of Light
Light is an essential element in photography. In fact the word photography translates from ancient Greek as follows:
photo = light
graphy = writing, drawing or painting
That's a lovely definition, and it makes perfect sense. But, as you can see, my own definition goes further.
“Photography, at its best, explores the transient, transforming and transcendental nature of light.”
The Church Of Our Lady Bruges is a major tourist attraction in the city. I photographed the exterior from a variety of angles and had a lot of fun making a variety of images inside the church.
This photo was made late at night. It had been raining, but the sky cleared and I was able to photograph this very peaceful scene.
Artificial lights illuminate an historic building on the canal in Bruges, Belgium.
Bruges By Night: Calm and Quiet
After numerous stops along the way I made my last few photos of that evening directly across the road from my hotel.
Because it was quite dark a 10-second exposure was required. I simply waited for the gentle breeze to stop long enough for me to be able to record stillness in the leaves of the trees on either edge of the frame.
Notice how the wall on the bottom left of the frame leads the eye towards the main building. The gentle movement of water in the canal is helpful as it adds a sense of movement and the passing of time within an otherwise static image.
I rendered the final image into black and white prior to adding a sepia-like effect. I feel that adds an eerie mood and a sense of nostalgia to the image.
Bruges is an important and beautifully preserved historical city that offers loads of picture perfect opportunities for the enthusiastic travel photographer.
My own experience, arriving in the middle of a hot and very busy summer's day, was to leave the crowds behind and explore the backstreets, the alleyways and the paths seldom trod by the average group tourist.
It was great fun, but there’s something quite special about night photography and the old town of Bruges, called Brugge by the local Flemish folk, offers a wealth of opportunities for the enthusiastic photographer.
I know I’II return, hopefully for an extended stay.
