Amsterdam gets photographed more than almost any city its size, and most of those photos 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 the least. Nearly everything that separates a canal photograph from a postcard is decided before the camera comes out: which bank you are standing on, which way that stretch of water runs, and what time you got up.
The canals curve, and that is the whole problem
The main canals bend. Herengracht, Keizersgracht and Prinsengracht sweep in a horseshoe around the old centre, so one canal faces a different direction at each end of itself. A stretch with lovely side light at eight in the morning is flat by the time you have strolled ten minutes along it, because the water quietly turned through sixty degrees while you walked.
The smaller canals cut across the horseshoe, running roughly north-east to south-west, and they behave differently. They take the sun straight down their length at the two ends of the day. That is why the long views along Reguliersgracht and Brouwersgracht work at dawn and dusk, and why the big curved canals are better mid-morning.
You do not have to memorise any of that. You need one habit: before you lift the camera, find the row of houses with sun on its front. That row is the photograph. The other side is a wall of shadow with windows in it.
The bank that keeps the light
This far north the sun never gets overhead. In midsummer it reaches about 61 degrees, and in December it scrapes across at fourteen, which is lower than the rooftops. So house fronts pointing anywhere towards the south are lit most of the day, and fronts pointing north are lit almost never.
On a canal running east to west, that makes the north bank the good one, and you photograph it from the south bank. It sounds obvious and it gets ignored constantly, because the instinct is to photograph whatever is 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 all through a short day means the house fronts get that long raking light from ten in the morning to three in the afternoon. Summer only offers the same quality 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 shrinks away to a point, and there is nothing at all in the near part of the frame. That is why those photos always feel as though they were taken from far away, even though you were standing right there.
Two better spots, both thirty seconds away. Stand at the corner where the bridge meets the quay, so a railing, a bollard or a bicycle fills the near edge and the canal runs off diagonally behind it. Or walk to the next bridge and shoot back, which is the only way to get a bridge, its arch and its reflection into one picture. That is exactly how the famous seven-bridge view down Reguliersgracht works.
Amsterdam hands you foreground for free if you will take it: bikes chained to railings, bollards, a houseboat and its ropes, a branch over the water. The city is small and cluttered, and the clutter is what makes a photo of it feel like a place instead of 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 flat water doubles the picture: houses, lamps, sky, all of it again upside down. After that it stays broken until evening.
One boat is not the end of the world. A wake dies down 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 different. Anything more than a light breeze and there is no reflection coming back at all, so photograph something that does not need one: a house front, a doorway, gables against the sky.
One technical note. A polarising filter kills reflections, which is the opposite of what you want here, so take it off or turn it until the reflection comes back. It is still worth carrying for wet cobbles and for glare on a grey day.
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. There is a short spell where the two are close enough in brightness that one photo can hold both. Before it, the lamps are invisible against a bright sky. After it, the sky is black, the lamps are blown out, and the picture is a string of white dots.
That window opens about twenty minutes after sunset and has more or less closed fifty minutes after it. Which means turning up at sunset is turning up late. Be in position, framed and focused, while it still looks too bright out, so you spend the window taking pictures instead of looking for one.
It is also the one hour when the crowds are on your side. The bridges empty out around dinner, the water usually settles in the evening, and on the straight 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 are worth the walk. None of them are secret, and it does not matter, because the hour does more work than the place, 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 looks like the obvious choice and is 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 to you, and a longer lens stacks the bridges up, which is the only reason the seven-bridge view reads as seven bridges. There is more on that in the focal length piece.
Bring the smallest tripod you will actually carry. Blue hour on a bridge means a two second exposure, the parapets are wide enough to rest a camera on, and a bridge full of people is no place for a big tripod anyway. Watch out for bounce: a bridge with traffic on it moves, and two seconds is long enough to show it. 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 out, and the flat grey sky that ruins a wide view causes no trouble at all if you keep the sky out of the frame and photograph the water and the houses instead.
Last thing: listen behind you. The canals are narrow, the quays are narrower, and the thing coming up silently behind you 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.
- The curved canals bend, so one canal faces several ways. The straight ones 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.