Everybody photographs this square. There is probably no square in Europe with a worse ratio of photos taken to photos worth keeping. I stood there anyway, with the sun sitting somewhere behind the Týn towers, and shot into it.

The light was wrong. That’s the whole thing. Late afternoon, sun behind the church, every façade on that side of the square dropped into shadow while the sky stayed loud. The camera hated it. Meter for the buildings and the clouds turn into white paste. Meter for the sky and half the frame goes to mud.

I metered for the sky.

Letting the buildings go dark

You lose the stonework. All that 14th century detail on the Týn, the tracery, the little gallery running under the spires, gone. What you get instead is shape. Nine or ten dark points against blue, which is honestly what your brain stores when you remember Prague anyway. Nobody walks away from that square carrying a mental image of masonry texture. They carry the silhouette.

The trick, if it counts as one, is to underexpose on purpose and then lift the shadows just a little in raw. Not all the way. If you push the buildings back up to “correct” you get that grey HDR sludge that makes a photo look like a brochure nobody read. I lifted maybe a third of a stop and stopped.

The column is the other thing holding the frame together. Marian column, the Virgin on top with her halo of stars. Looks four hundred years old. It isn’t. The original came down in 1918, days after independence, because a crowd decided it was a Habsburg thing. The replica went up in 2020. In a backlit photo it reads as ancient stone, which I find quietly funny.

Keeping the junk in

There’s a SIGNAL festival board planted in the middle of the square. There’s a sign for a Dalí, Saudek, Warhol show. There’s a Moser shop and a café awning and a guide in a red cap holding up a paddle for a group that has already wandered off.

I know the instinct. Clone it out, wait until the square empties, come back at six in the morning like everyone else with a tripod. Then you get the clean version that could have been taken in 1994 or 2036.

I’d rather have the version with the exhibition banner in it. That banner dates the frame. Ten years from now that’s the only part of the photo that will tell you anything you didn’t already know.

Same with the people. Half the bottom edge is heads and shoulders, out of focus, badly lit. A green scarf that is doing more work than anything else in the lower third. It’s not a nice foreground. It’s an honest one. The square is a crowd. Photographing it empty is a kind of lie, and it’s a very popular lie.

What I’d do differently

Wider would have helped. I clipped the astronomical clock side entirely, which was a choice at the time and a mistake by evening. Also I should have dropped lower. Shooting from standing height in a crowd puts a hundred heads across your bottom edge, and the ones nearest the lens go soft and blobby. Crouch and you get sky under the shapes instead.

But I’m not going back to Prague this month to fix a foreground.

The sun was where it was.

• Prague
• travel photography
• backlight
• architecture
• street