Where are the good places to photograph Shanghai?

A list of places is the easiest answer and the least useful: the famous photographs are the ones everyone takes.

Choose the photograph, then the place

What can be photographed falls into eight kinds, under different conditions.

The skyline across the river depends on visibility and light, and draws the largest crowd. The historic facades depend on the sun’s angle and where you stand: from the raised promenade you see only the upper storeys, so cross the road and look up. The old-city lanes are narrow, dark and full of ordinary life, and depend on walking in. The plane-tree streets of 1920s and 1930s houses depend on season and light, and mostly show the outside of a wall. Converted industrial sites are large, open, and depend on composition. The classical gardens depend on the season and on opening, and stop working when crowded. Ordinary residential streets hold markets, repair stands and washing hung out of windows, and are the easiest to skip. The night illumination depends on how steady the stretch after dark is.

The most photographed shot usually rewards least

By volume, the riverside skyline is the city’s most photographed, least informative single picture. It is handsome, but almost every version is the same position and direction.

Photographs that hold up usually come from a street, a lane or a building detail: a faded wall, a staircase, a tree’s shadow across a facade. They need no shared viewpoint or queue; the cost is walking in.

Light and weather come before the place

The useful light sits at the two lowest sun angles: after sunrise and before sunset. Low light has direction, so walls, shadows and people have depth; in between, white light comes from overhead and everything is flat. The timing shifts across the year; check the day’s times rather than memory.

Haze destroys the panorama and rescues nothing else. Rain is the reverse: fewer people, deeper colour on the walls, reflections spreading the shopfronts, so street photographs improve and the skyline worsens.

Two things to accept: from Puxi the sunset skyline is backlit, the towers left as outlines until the lights come on; lanes are dark, where a phone struggles. Everything else a phone handles.

Crowds, rules, and who it suits

At the obvious positions the crowd is not slightly larger: backs of heads and raised hands fill the frame, and good positions mean queuing. Early morning is the reliable answer, at the cost of flat light; walking a few hundred metres along the river beats waiting.

Photographing people needs care: catch their eye first, and put the camera down if they object. A residential district, a market and a park full of morning exercisers are not a backdrop. Official buildings and some security areas may not be photographed; a sign or an instruction settles it. Drones are restricted across much of the city, which must be checked with the authorities.

It suits anyone willing to walk and to rise early, and interested in streets; not a half day with a checklist of landmarks. Three places are overrated: the most famous stretch of waterfront, where everyone raises a phone at one spot; the busiest pedestrian street, lined with the same chains; the commercial quarter outside the gardens, where queues take most time. The alternative is not a more obscure location but a different subject: walk on along the river, or into a small plane-tree street or a former factory site.

The best photograph of Shanghai is usually the one you took that nobody else has.