Blue hour at Charles bridge

The story behind the photo

Charles Bridge at blue hour, photographed from the waterline rather than from the bridge itself, with a scatter of pale rocks running out of the foreground towards the arches and the old town glowing behind them. The rocks are the reason this frame exists: without them the picture would be a postcard; with them it becomes a path.

I placed them in the frame deliberately, along a diagonal that leads from the bottom corner to the first arch, so the eye enters the photograph by the river rather than by the monument. A long exposure then flattened the Vltava into a dark mirror and let the rocks keep their edges, and the composition depends on that contrast: something sharp and near, something soft and far.

The light is that short window when the sky is still blue and the city lights are already on. Any earlier and the amber of the lamps is lost in daylight; any later and the sky goes black and the bridge floats without context. It lasts perhaps twenty minutes, and it is the only hour when Prague looks both inhabited and asleep.

The bridge is more than six hundred years old, has seen kings, armies and floods, and today carries a permanent crowd. From down here none of that is visible, and for a moment it feels as though the river has the place to itself.

I wanted the most photographed bridge in central Europe seen from the one position where nobody is standing: below it, among the stones.