A L M E L O C I T Y
A T N I G H T

_Travels_{/ A l m e l o}

_{_{by Ruben Cress}}

_{Ruben Cress | Almelo City}

_{S u m m a r y}

While most of the city is asleep, I used to wake up and work. I don't know about you, but I enjoy working during the night. I get easily distracted by noises or sounds. It doesn't disturb me enough that I can't work, but Churchbells, loud chatter, or idiots in cars that want to blow up their exhausts kind of do. When I was living in Almelo, I lived most of my time there very close to the city, and during my bartender years, I lived in the center. It was quite alive during the weekends.

At the time when I was living with a few friends, a friend of mine wanted to learn how to photograph. Because I had two (working) Canon 5D Mark IIs and enough lenses, I thought it would be cool to teach him. I've received requests to teach photography from other people before, which I all turned down because I thought I am a bad teacher. I did do a 1 on 1 before that, so I kind of knew how I could teach the basics of photography.

My friend was quite eager to learn, and since we were living in one apartment and he had nothing else to do, we planned some "excursions" to do some practical learning. This included waking up early as fuck, or getting out during the night.

So, this little trip downtown included night photography, where I taught him to photograph with and without a tripod during the night. This would come in handy as you would get used to changing the ISO, Shutterspeed, and Aperture real quick if you keep on swapping to shoot with and without a tripod.

Almelo was the "place to be" for me, I didn't know what it was like to live in other cities (besides the middle-of-nowhere towns where I grew up). If you live there, you probably have seen everything at least once, so you can navigate pretty well. I took him to a spot nearby the train station where a new parking garage was built, it looked kind of futuristic back in the day, and the lights were pretty cool as well. It is very close to the "Javatoren", a tall corporate building that you could see across all of Almelo.

Working with city lights at night is just super cool, especially with long exposures. You can get that little bit of extra in your shot and capture the mood of the environment nicely. While wandering around, we did see some cars driving in and out of the garage, so we decided to go to different places. We even saw some "artwork" we haven't seen before. I thought it would be a good exercise to photograph it as it isn't something that gets noticed, but it was a pretty big object as well.

Enjoy the photographs.