Last week, Ann-Christine’s “Illustrate a Favorite Quote or Poem” challenge inspired us to find quotations to illustrate with our images. This week Sofia gives us a challenge to compare and contrast. She writes, “This week’s challenge is about Day and Night… Show us how you see them both, if and/or how it changes the way you photograph, whichever is your favourite.” You can read her entire challenge post here.

Sofia’s challenge was a real challenge for me to find even a few night-shot comparisons. I don’t do a lot of night photography; when I do, the images are of a place we are “passing through”. I found three locations where I captured both a daytime and a night image from approximately the same perspective. I also included a couple of my favorite night shots.

My opening image set is from the upper level above the San Antonio River Walk. It was near our hotel and I happened to capture a couple getting ready to take a selfie. From Sofia’s quote above, you can see that in these cases, I happened to only change the perspective between night and day in one of the sets.

Though the crop is slightly different in aspect ratio and I was a few steps closer to the bridge, my night shot of the bridge was more to capture the moon just peeking through the clouds above. Unfortunately, there was no couple there to be our subject.

My next comparison features two views of Nashville from slightly different perspectives. During the day, there are tourists, but not nearly as many as at night. The barricades are most used at night to allow a large number of pedestrians the extra space needed to walk in front of the bars and music venues.

A few hours later, the streets were crowded, but when the rains came, almost everyone ducked inside one of the venues or found a marque to stand underneath. The perspective is slightly different as I wanted to capture the reflections of the neon lights in the wet street.

On a business trip to Baltimore a few years ago, I was staying on one of the upper floors of a hotel that was built on the edge of the Inner Harbor. This image was captured shortly after sunrise. The nearby hotel on the left is across the street from our hotel.

This view is from a slightly different perspective and includes more of our neighboring hotel and less of the opposite shoreline. The water in the inner harbor is the Patapsco River. If you were on a yacht and you wanted to sail from here to Cape Charles, you would travel over 250 miles (400 km) to reach the Atlantic Ocean. Inner Harbor is a perfect description of this inland waterway. It’s a lot shorter drive between the cities than it is a sail. Of course, some of that extra distance includes cruising stops along the way. Details here.

Concluding this challenge, I thought I would share two of my favorite black-and-white night photographs. The image above was captured looking north on Broadway toward the iconic 1920s-era Fargo Theater. It still operates at 98 years young as the Center for the Arts in Fargo-Moorhead. It has a weekly schedule of first-run and classic movies as well as live performances.

Last January (2023), I included this black-and-white image of Crutched Friars near the Cheshire Cheese Pub on the One-Lens Walk Challenge. I trimmed it into a panoramic image in part to crop out a very bright street light that shone down from the train bridge that runs over this part of the road. You can pixel-peep these photos on my Flickr site to see the camera type and other metadata (if you are a photo nerd like me) here.

Thanks, Sofia, for encouraging me to find a couple of these images still in my raw file originals folders and allowing me to share them for this challenge. Next week, Egidio challenges us with his first theme, Warm Colors. I’ve already been searching for appropriate images to include. If you’d like to contribute to the challenge but aren’t quite sure how to get started, check here.

John Steiner