Most gallery photos fail for the same reason. The photographer points the camera at the art, gets a flat rectangle of someone else’s work, and goes home with a bad reproduction of a good painting. The room is the more interesting picture. Walls, spacing, wall text, and one person deciding where to stand. This frame works because the subject is turned away from the big canvas and reading the panel instead.

There’s a window of maybe twenty minutes where a street like this works. The sky still holds blue. The sodium lamps are already on. Ten minutes later the sky goes black and you’re just shooting lamps against nothing. I got this one somewhere in the middle of that window, standing on the tram tracks at the bottom of Jaffa Road with the Holy Trinity domes sitting at the far end of the street like a full stop.

There are at least four different light sources in this frame and no single white balance setting is correct for any of them. The residential streets below are running on old sodium, somewhere around 2000K, which is the deep amber you see across most of the lower half. The port is lit with newer floodlights, considerably cooler and closer to neutral. Office windows are fluorescent green. And the searchlight cutting across the bay is xenon, up past 6000K, which is why it reads as blue against everything else.