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.

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.