As a photographer, does it matter whether you’re in Chicago, Nashville, or Seattle? We think there’s much more to a great photo town than dazzling architecture, lively street life, and picturesque scenery. A host of other factors—from the weather to the culture—combine to make a place hospitable to photographers.
To measure the differences, we compared the 30 most populous cities in the United States across 10 categories, including annual average percentage of sunny hours, number of days with measurable precipitation, per-capita number of camera shops and museums and galleries that exhibit photos. We even counted private security firms, since we’ve found that the more rent-a-cops, the harder it can be to take pictures in public.
Our sources? Municipal websites and federal databases from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, General Services Administration, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Environmental Protection Agency, as well as private sources such as online yellow pages.
Each city was ranked 1 through 30 in each category (1 being the best). We asked our editors to assess the relative importance of each category for photographers, then used their responses to weight the scores, so that high marks in, say, parks and zoos counted more heavily than photo processors. For more on our methods, see page 4. The final ranking, along with each city’s rank by category, is page 2 and 3.
Here are profiles of four of the cities in our top 10 and what makes them so photo-friendly.
DENVER, CO
OVERALL RANK: 1st
OVERALL RANK: 1st
Photo courtesy of Fotalia
Denver’s smooth braiding of mountain trails, historic architecture, and nightlife engenders a visual confidence and boldness that’s attracted photographers for 150 years. In fact, there are 12 photography clubs in town. “Our club has grown a lot,” reports Larry Beneda, a long-time officer in the Denver Photographic Society (www.denverphotosociety.org). “We now have 60 members, and they’re staying longer and participating more in the competitions.”
Downtown Denver is a surprisingly photogenic mix of three eras—1870s, 1920s, and turn-of-the-21st century. “There’s great variety of subject and background,” says local pro photographer Eric Stephenson (www.stephensonweddings.com). “LoDo—Lower Downtown—especially has some fantastic backdrops.”
The 23-blocks in LoDo contain about 125 designated historic structures dating back to Denver’s founding in the late 1850s, when saloons thrived. Now it thrums with nightclubs, restaurants, galleries, and lofts. But there’s also a separate historic district filled with Art Deco and Gothic Revival buildings from Denver’s early-20th-century boom years.
After sparkling mornings, dramatic bulbous thunderheads boil up almost every afternoon above the Front Range peaks on the western edge of the city. Capricious weather can give you 70-degree temperatures and quaking aspen trees one day, blizzards the next. Far from a comedown, “snow is usually a bonus,” says Stephenson. Winter and summer sports feed into a year-round energy that keeps the denizens on their toes, with cameras cocked and loaded. And, of course, the rugged Rockies are just a short wagon-ride westward.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA
OVERALL RANK: 2nd
San Francisco isn’t the sunniest—Phoenix and Las Vegas are tied for that spot—but its 66-percent annual average hours of sun is about perfect for bringing out color while preserving detail in the shadows. (It also happened to be the midpoint of our 30 cities, giving it a #1 rank in that category.) The onshore Pacific winds keep the East Bay smog in its place, allowing the cat-footed fog to drift through the treetops and bridge cables. And passing clouds and fog soften the light when you want lower contrast.
San Francisco fosters a vibrant photographic culture. “We don’t have any trouble organizing photo meet-ups,” understates Richard Zimmerman, a board member of the Photochrome Camera Club (www.photochrome.org).
To pro shooter Erin Kunkel, “The whole city is beautifully compact, and within a few blocks you have radically different neighborhoods, shops, and people.”
You can shoot with a breezy, moody backdrop along the waterfront, then walk a few blocks up a hill and find a totally different microclimate that affords a bright sunny view of the bay. Neon slicks the streets of Chinatown, and from the vantage point of the Marin Headlands, the faded red skeleton of the Golden Gate Bridge seems to glow in the afternoon sun, the bristling city posing for you in the background.
Even the people are picturesque. On commercial shoots, “I cast real people, rather than go through an agency to hire models,” says Kunkel. “The population is so diverse. People dress as a way to express their identity, and they’re so open to trying things.”
This was Ansel Adams’s hometown, where he received his bent nose as a result of being thrown against a wall in the 1906 earthquake. Most of the city was destroyed, and other than the redwoods, there isn’t much here that’s older than 100 years. Nonetheless, San Francisco’s visual impact remains timeless.
AUSTIN, TX
OVERALL RANK: 3rd
OVERALL RANK: 3rd
Springtime in Austin is to photographers what wintertime on Maui is to surfers: endless waves of opportunity. In town every March comes South by Southwest (www.sxsw.com), a musical gathering of the tribes of moguls and artists on the make, leaving behind a thriving year-round indie music scene. Just 15 minutes past the city limits the annual riot of Texas wildflowers breaks out in the Hill Country. Above it all the luminous clouds block just enough of the bright Texas sky so you can leave your camera on auto mode and fire away.
Both a state capital and a college town (with the biggest urban campus in the country), as well as a growing software-development center, the city’s contradictions have spawned a years-long Keep Austin Weird crusade. Sixth Street and SoCo—South Congress Avenue—draw the nightclub crowds, where you can snap away at musicians-at-work pretty much unhampered. “Students come in with pictures from the clubs quite often,” reports Austin pro Brian Loflin (www.loflin-images.com), who teaches photography and is president of the Austin Shutterbug Club.
The parks, Zilker Botanical Gardens (www.zilkergarden.org), and greenery along Lady Bird Lake—a reservoir on the Colorado River, which runs through town—produce plenty of the photo contest entries for the 100-member club. The presence of some 50,000 students at the university creates its own international community.
The wildflowers are gone in late April, just as Art City Austin fills the streets with working visual artists. Then, starting in May, “we get these great storms,” which are photogenic in their ominousness, explains Loflin. But Austin is at the bottom end of Tornado Alley—by midsummer the weather is too hot and sticky to raise a camera to eye level. Best to plan your photo tour there for some other time of the year.
PHILADELPHIA, PA
OVERALL RANK: 8th
OVERALL RANK: 8th
Photo courtesy of Ruth Savitz
Philadelphia was arguably the main center of photography in the U.S. for the first 50 years of the new medium, beginning in 1839. Skylit photo studios clustered up and down Ninth Street, South Street, and Germantown Avenue. It was also an historic place for female photographers—the 1910 founding president of the national Women’s Federation of Photographers was Philadelphian Mary Carnell.
Jill Sprague (www.redbubble.com/people/SnowInSummer), a Philly-based semi-pro photographer, calls the city “still the center of things.”
Aside from the usual tourist stops such as Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, Philadelphia has plenty of historic sites to photograph. The key to capturing it all? Traveling on foot. Sprague walks all over the compact cityscape, from the Philadelphia Museum of Art (where Rocky exulted), down along the Schuylkill River to 9,200-acre Fairmount Park full of deer, birds, and native forest.
The historic architecture of Old City Philadelphia, the colorful crowds on South Street, the big cat habitat at the Philadelphia Zoo, the gentrifying row homes of South Philly, and the eerie forest of memorial obelisks and chiseled angels in Laurel Hill cemetery have attracted Sprague since she got her first camera at age eight.
“But my number-one place to shoot is Eastern State Penitentiary,” she declares. This is a fortress-like historic landmark, where decay and bright green life and ghostly light draw photographers from all over the country. “I’ve shot hundreds of pictures there, and I still find things to take pictures of every time I go,” she says. “It’s really mind-blowing.”
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