How I Photograph City Lights in Winter
Every winter here in Bergen, where I live, I find myself looking for the same thing: the perfect evening when the city, the snow and the light come together.
Bergen glowing on a winter evening, with fresh snow on the rooftops, illuminated streets and harbour reflections beneath a dark blue sky.
Those conditions do not happen often. In a typical winter, I might only get one to three real opportunities, so I follow the weather forecast closely. The ideal evening is when it has been snowing throughout the day, then stops just before darkness falls, with a little clearer sky beginning to appear. That combination matters a great deal. Fresh snow reflects the city lights beautifully, while the clearer sky gives the scene more depth and structure.
Timing is just as important as the weather. In a city, snow quickly becomes dirty along the roads and pavements, so it is important to photograph the scene soon after the snowfall. At the same time, it should be dark, but not so late that the sky turns completely black. Here in Bergen, that usually means about an hour after sunset. By then I need to be in position, with the camera already on the tripod and everything prepared in advance.
A tripod is essential for this kind of photography. The light is limited, and without full stability it becomes much harder to keep the whole scene sharp. I also use a remote release to avoid introducing vibration when the shutter is triggered. Aperture matters too: I usually work with a fairly small aperture, both to achieve good depth of field and to create the star-shaped highlights that appear around the strongest light sources, as they do in parts of this image.
The main challenge is contrast. Winter city scenes often contain very bright highlights and much darker surrounding areas, and it is easy for the brightest parts of the image to burn out. When there is not too much movement in the frame, one effective solution is to make three different exposures and combine them afterwards into a single HDR image. That is what I did here. It allows the light to glow without losing too much detail in the brightest areas.
What I like about this type of image is that it often attracts attention far beyond photography itself. Winter cityscapes have a way of speaking to people immediately. This particular photograph was published in Bergen’s two largest newspapers, Bergens Tidende and Bergensavisen. One of them used the headline “Bergen gløder” — Bergen glows — which felt like a very fitting description of the scene.
For me, that is part of the appeal of photographing a city in winter. When the conditions are right, the ordinary streets, rooftops and harbour lights are transformed into something more atmospheric, more reflective and more memorable than usual. But because those evenings are rare, you have to be ready for them when they come.
