Grey sky, mid-morning, mid-October. This is the light most people complain about and then shoot in anyway, because you don’t get to reschedule a trip around the forecast. It’s also the only light that renders a square like this one without tearing the exposure apart. Look at what the cloud cover is doing. The pale plaster on the west range keeps its texture. The arcades underneath aren’t black holes. The dark Gothic towers of the Týn Church hold detail instead of going to silhouette, which is exactly what happens to them against a clear blue sky at this hour.

Most hero image slots on the web are landscape. Most people looking at them are holding a phone. That gap is the whole argument for shooting the vertical version of a scene even when you already have the horizontal one in the bag, and tall subjects are where the vertical version usually wins outright. The frame above is Prague Old Town Hall from the square, shot ultra-wide from a low position.

On paper this scene should not work. A floodlit white stone bridge sits against a sky with no light in it at all, the water throws back a dozen point sources at different colour temperatures, and the whole thing has to be held still by hand because you are standing on a floating pontoon with people moving past your shoulder. Start with why the tripod is not the answer here. The banks along this stretch are narrow, busy well past midnight, and the good vantage points are all working infrastructure: vaporetto stops, taxi pontoons, delivery moorings.

The Louvre has been photographed more than almost any building on earth. Your version adds nothing. The pyramid is lit the same way every night, from the same fixed positions, and the courtyard gives you maybe four viewpoints that anyone bothers with. Show up with a camera and you are re-shooting a postcard that already exists in better light, with better weather, taken by someone who waited three hours for the sky to go the right shade of blue.

The seafront promenade is one of the few street environments that reliably delivers subjects moving in a predictable direction at a predictable pace. People walk the length of it, they walk slowly, and they walk away from you as often as toward you. That last part is usually treated as a wasted frame. It isn’t. A long lens does most of the work here. At 85mm or 100mm on a crop body you are effectively shooting at 135mm or 160mm, which stacks the promenade into a shallow ribbon and pulls the distant benches, café lights and background walkers into a soft wash directly behind the subject.

Container terminals are among the most photogenic industrial environments anywhere and among the hardest to get into. They are also, from the outside, considerably more accessible than most photographers assume, because the interesting frames are rarely inside the fence. What follows is a practical guide to working the perimeter. It is not legal advice, and the rules vary enormously by country. Verify locally before you go, particularly anywhere with active security concerns, and treat the general principles below as a starting point rather than an authority.

The 135mm prime is the cheapest good lens in the used market and has been for thirty years. Every SLR system made one, most made several, they were sold in enormous numbers as portrait lenses, and then autofocus arrived and the entire installed base became unwanted. A clean M42 Takumar 135 or a Canon FD 135 costs less than a decent filter. On a crop body it becomes roughly a 200mm equivalent, and that is the focal length where industrial subjects start behaving properly.

Most gallery photos fail for the same reason. The photographer points the camera at the art, gets a flat rectangle of someone else’s work, and goes home with a bad reproduction of a good painting. The room is the more interesting picture. Walls, spacing, wall text, and one person deciding where to stand. This frame works because the subject is turned away from the big canvas and reading the panel instead.

There’s a window of maybe twenty minutes where a street like this works. The sky still holds blue. The sodium lamps are already on. Ten minutes later the sky goes black and you’re just shooting lamps against nothing. I got this one somewhere in the middle of that window, standing on the tram tracks at the bottom of Jaffa Road with the Holy Trinity domes sitting at the far end of the street like a full stop.

The stall had everything a photographer thinks they want. Whole crabs on crushed ice, whelks in their shells, three grades of oyster, lemon wedges cut that morning, parsley banked up like hedging. I shot the counter twice, wide, both frames from standing height. Both were mush. Too much of everything and no reason for the eye to stop anywhere. Then I bought one oyster, the vendor handed it over in a paper tray, and the picture was already made.