Amsterdam is photographed more than almost any city its size, and most of those pictures are taken from the middle of a bridge at two in the afternoon, which is the one spot and the one hour where the place gives you least. Nearly everything that separates a canal photograph from a postcard is settled before the camera comes out: which bank you are standing on, which way that stretch of water happens to run, and what time you got up.
The ring is not a grid, and that is the whole problem
The main canals bend. Herengracht, Keizersgracht and Prinsengracht sweep in a horseshoe around the old centre, which means one canal faces a different direction at each end of itself. A stretch that is beautifully side-lit at eight in the morning is flat by the time you have strolled ten minutes along it, because the water has quietly turned through sixty degrees while you were walking.
The radial canals cut across the ring, so they run roughly north-east to south-west, and they behave differently. They take the sun down their length at the two ends of the day, which is why the long views along Reguliersgracht and Brouwersgracht work at dawn and at dusk, and why the ring canals are better in the middle of the morning.
None of that has to be memorised. It only needs one habit: before you raise the camera, find the row of gables with sun on its face. That row is the photograph. The other side is a wall of shadow with windows in it.
The bank that keeps the light
At 52 degrees north the sun never gets overhead. At midsummer it tops out around 61 degrees, and in December it scrapes across at fourteen, which is lower than the gables. The consequence is simple: fronts pointing anywhere south of east or west are lit for most of the day, and fronts pointing north are lit for almost none of it.
So on a canal running east to west, the north bank is the good one, and you photograph it from the south bank. That reads as obvious and it is routinely ignored, because the instinct is to photograph whatever happens to be in front of you when you arrive. Cross the bridge. Four minutes of walking beats any amount of editing afterwards.
Winter is not the poor relation here. A low sun for the whole of a short day means the fronts take raking light from ten in the morning until three in the afternoon, which is a quality of light that summer only offers at hours when nobody wants to be awake.
Get off the middle of the bridge
The centre of a bridge is the worst spot on it. Everything is symmetrical, the canal recedes to a point, and there is nothing whatever in the near half of the frame, which is why those pictures always feel as though they were taken from far away even though you were standing right there.
Two better positions, both within thirty seconds of it. Stand at the corner where the bridge meets the quay, so a parapet, a bollard or a bicycle takes the near edge and the canal runs off diagonally behind it. Or walk to the next bridge along and shoot back, which is the only way to get a bridge, its arch and its reflection into one frame, and it is exactly how the seven-bridge view down Reguliersgracht works.
Amsterdam hands you foreground for free if you will accept it: bikes chained to railings, bollards, a houseboat and its cleats, a branch over the water. The city is small and cluttered, and the clutter is what makes a picture of it feel like a place rather than a diagram.
The water is a mirror for about three hours a day
The reflection is why anyone photographs a canal, and it runs to a timetable. From first light until the tour boats start, roughly nine in the morning, the water is genuinely flat, and a flat canal doubles the picture: gables, lamps, sky, all of it again upside down. After that it is broken until evening.
One boat is not the end of it. A wake dies in three or four minutes and the surface comes back, so if a boat goes through while you are set up, wait rather than move. Wind is a different matter. Anything above a light breeze and there is no reflection to wait for, and the honest response is to photograph something that does not need one: a facade, a doorway, gables against the sky.
One technical note. A polariser kills a reflection, which is the opposite of what you want here, so take it off or turn it until the reflection returns. It is still worth carrying for wet cobbles and for the glare on a grey day, and worth remembering that it works on the canal too.
Blue hour is twenty five minutes, not an evening
The lamps on the bridges and the lights in the windows come on well before the sky goes dark, and there is a short span where the two sit close enough in brightness that one exposure holds both. Before it, the lamps are invisible against a bright sky. After it, the sky is black, the lamps are blown out, and the photograph is a string of white dots.
The window opens roughly twenty minutes after sunset and has more or less shut fifty minutes after it. Which means turning up at sunset is turning up late. You want to be in position, framed and focused, while it still looks too bright, so that you spend the window making pictures instead of hunting for one.
It is also the one hour when the crowds work in your favour. The bridges empty around dinner, the water usually settles with the evening, and on the radial canals the lit arches line up one behind another, which is the view the city is actually famous for.
Where to go, and what each one is for
Six that repay the walk. None of them are secret and it does not matter, because the hour does more work than the location, and a well-known view at seven in the morning is an empty one.
- Brouwersgracht. Warehouses with shutters, houseboats, and a canal running east to west so the north bank takes light all morning. The best single street in the city for a first hour.
- Reguliersgracht, from Herengracht. Seven bridges, each arch inside the last. It only works at blue hour with the arches lit, and only from the north side of the junction.
- Groenburgwal, looking at the Zuiderkerk. A white drawbridge, a narrow canal and a tower at the end of it. Painted by Monet, photographed ever since, and still good, because the composition is built into the geography.
- Bloemgracht and the Jordaan. Smaller canals, lower houses, more trees. Better than the grand ring on an overcast day, because there is no wide sky to blow out.
- The Amstel at the Magere Brug. Wide water, so it behaves like a river rather than a canal. The place to go when wind has ruined the reflections everywhere else.
- Prinsengracht at the Westerkerk. The tower gives you something vertical at the end of a long horizontal view, which is the standing problem with canal frames.
Practical things that make a difference
A wide lens is the obvious choice and usually the wrong one. Canals are already long and empty down the middle, and a wide lens makes the far bank tiny. Something around 35mm to 50mm keeps the houses the size they feel, and a short telephoto stacks the bridges up, which is what makes the seven-bridge view read as seven bridges at all. There is more on that in the focal length piece.
Bring the smallest tripod you will actually carry. Blue hour on a bridge is a two second exposure, the parapets are wide enough to rest a camera on, and a bridge with people on it is no place for a large tripod at any hour. Watch for the bounce: a bridge with traffic moves, and two seconds will show it, so take three frames and keep the one that landed between cyclists.
Rain is not a reason to stay in. Wet cobbles double every light in the street, the crowds thin, and the flat grey sky that ruins a wide view is no trouble at all if you keep the sky out of the frame and photograph the water and the fronts instead.
Finally, listen behind you. The canals are narrow, the quays narrower, and the thing approaching silently at speed is a bicycle with right of way and no interest in your composition.
The short version
- Find the lit bank first, then the frame. Usually that means crossing the bridge.
- Ring canals bend, so one canal has several orientations. Radial canals run north-east.
- Flat water lasts from first light until the boats start, around nine.
- A wake settles in four minutes. Wind does not settle at all.
- Stand at the corner of a bridge, or on the next bridge. Never in the middle.
- Blue hour runs twenty to fifty minutes after sunset. Arrive early and wait.
- 35mm to 50mm keeps the city the size it feels. Wide makes it empty.
The photograph on the front of this site is one of these: Amsterdam Canals, taken from a quay rather than from a bridge, at an hour when the water was still holding still. The rest of the catalogue is largely the same city on mornings like it.