The Artful Engineer

Part of the fun of exploring Bruges in the run-up to Christmas is all the lights and light-shows scattered around the city center. Since recapping Christmas decorations isn’t something that is going to appeal to anyone in late March, I chose pictures for this post that, by and large, aren’t overtly Christmasy.

In the image above, I love the spooky-looking tree, especially in tandem with the Gothic tower. The overall image feels dark, wet, and a little ominous. The strings of light in the lower right go against this mood, perhaps, but all of lights in the scene seem feeble against the darkness, so I think it works.

Daylight doesn’t last very long in northern Europe in December, but the transition to night takes a long time, so the so-called “blue hour” is a long one. That means that there is a lot of opportunity to find lit windows where the brightness of interior lights balances well with the ambient light outside. And there is always a nice warm-cool color contrast that results, too:

This next image is mostly a graphic combination of shapes. The artificial light illuminating the ceiling contrasts nicely with the blue sky, too. This image was taken about six minutes after sunset, which isn’t really night, but it feels like it. I compose by instinct, not rule, so I am always happy when I find a composition that works despite violating one. Here, the rule I am breaking is the “rule of odds,” which asserts that you should always have an odd number of things in your image. Please accept my apologies for having four chimneys and four ceiling beams in this image.

I often remove power lines from images, but I didn’t bother with this next one. In this case, the wires make curves that are well-placed in the overall composition, and we expect them to be there because of the lights.

When I was photographing the tower below, I had to look up into a light rain. The raindrops on the lens resulted in fun artifacts:

And now for something completely different…

This last image is unlike anything else that I can remember taking. It’s kind of an abstract street noir image. Nothing is sharp, but it is wonderfully atmospheric.

I hope you enjoyed these images. There is one more, very different from all of these, on the home page, so you might want to go check that one out, too. I recently figured figured out how to actually schedule that home page image to publish at a specific time, so there is now an “Image of the Week” feature of my website. Every week, at the same time a new blog post appears, a new Image of the Week will appear on the the front page of my website. At present, I have been using this as a place to put an “overflow” image that is related to the new post, but doesn’t necessarily fit with the others. In the future, I will probably showcase single images that aren’t part of a set large enough to support the half-dozen or so images that I typically use in a full post. And sometimes it will be an older image I want to share.

In the future, I may add a gallery of past images of the week. But for now, they are transient and only there for a week. Try not to miss them!