Quick Turn
San Juan at noon.
Get in and get out. Hit it and quit it. Take the money (shots) and run. Call it what you want, I love a city break. Give me those whirlwind trips where you whip into town, hit the ground running, get swept along by your own momentum, and collapse blissfully exhausted on the plane ride home. I approach each city break by becoming progressively more hyped as the hour approaches, with the intention of leaving it all on the pavement. Go hard or stay home.
City breaks can vary in length, but I am a particular fan of the one-night version. The intensity of this travel style inevitably appears in your photographs, which is exactly what I’m after. My one-night excursion to San Juan, Puerto Rico, has proven itself to be my city break prototype, so I have used some of those photos to illustrate this post. That trip was so productive, enjoyable, and memorable, I have used it as a framework for planning subsequent travel blitzes. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
The key to a successful city break lies in the transit. You might think that the location needs to be close to home, so you don’t spend all your brief window of time getting there and back. Not necessarily. If you can find a nonstop flight, most of your hemisphere is your oyster. I have traveled from the east coast of the United States to California not once, but twice, to spend a single night and come home the next day. One of those wasn’t even nonstop. With careful planning, a willingness to depart diabolically early and take a redeye home, and judicious use of time zones, these trips were not only possible but prolific.
A luxurious side effect of spending only one night in a location is compression of the hotel budget. If you’re only spending one night, you have more cash to splash out on nicer accommodations. This is actually a crucial point, because the location of your hotel is critically important to the efficiency and number of your photowalks. Being in the center of the action means you can experience more parts of your chosen city in your time frame, and you don’t have to drag everything you brought with you because you can drop back into the hotel for a lens change or to pick up different equipment. I prefer to frequent the low latitudes, and I cannot overstate the magnificence of dipping your sweaty, sweaty self into your room for a quick midafternoon shower. This is usually the time when your energy will start to flag after arising at zero-dark-thirty for the first flight of the day, and a nice hot shvitz will recharge your batteries like nothing else.
San Juan at sunset.
So now let’s break down what a city break looks like. Mine typically go something like this. Take the earliest possible flight, preferably nonstop, placing us in our target city around late morning. Go to our hotel to leave our bags and ask for an early check-in, if possible (nine times out of ten, we get our room keys at this point). Drop off our things, put together my first camera bag of the day, and go to lunch (I generally don’t start shooting until we’re done eating, unless there is a protest going on in the street outside the restaurant, as was the case in the photo at the top of this post). After lunch, shoot until midafternoon or so, then back to the hotel for a shower, disco nap if needed, and to reconfigure my camera bag for sunset/nighttime shooting. A nice dinner, some lowlight shooting, and early to bed (easy to do after getting up so early for a flight and walking around all day). Awaken early in the morning and head to the sunrise spot I’ve chosen. Then back to the hotel for breakfast, out for a little more shooting, then back before (ideally late) checkout to shower and pack. Leave bags at hotel desk, have a nice relaxed lunch, then head to the airport for an evening flight home. Nothing to it.
When you have a basic framework like this, you can anticipate your opportunities. Many city landmarks can be shot at midday, as can a lot of street scenes. But you will have only one sunset and one sunrise, so choose wisely. Know your sunrise and sunset times, as well as your cardinal directions in relation to certain landmarks you might like to have in the foreground. You can also scout this during your afternoon shooting right after you arrive, which can give you ideas and reveal obstacles such as power lines that you might not find on a map. It’s ok to recreate a shot someone else has taken before; that’s what I did in my sunset shot. I read a blog (Firefall Photography) where a fellow photographer shot Raices fountain at sunset, and I wanted to try my hand at it since I had not done a lot of backlit shooting at that point. That blog was one of the things that inspired me to start this one, because it was so helpful in planning my trip to San Juan. On the other hand, I turned a corner on my morning photowalk, and there was my sunrise, unplanned and unanticipated. But I had planned to be in La Perla at sunrise, not only for the eastern exposure, but because it was a safer time of day to be in that neighborhood. We can create our own luck by being in the right area at the right time.
San Juan at sunrise.
There are times when you want a nice, leisurely vacation with a little photography thrown in. But not today. Maybe you don’t have a lot of time off work, or the funds for a prolonged hotel stay. Channel your intense, action-packed, photos-first energy into the wild ride of a city break. Give it all you’ve got, and hold nothing back. You can sleep on the plane ride home.
