Two and a half years ago I went to photograph the Gröna Lund amusement park from Kastellholmen. Back then, it was in the middle of winter, and the sky was a dark background with the neon lights of the park in front of them. With the bright nights we have here in Stockholm during summer I thought I'd see what the park looked like with a much brighter background.
A nighttime excursion resulted in photos that were "just about average". Not ugly, but nothing I think really improved on the old photos. Chiefly, it was the flat dark blue sky that was boring. Now, there are two blue hours[a] during a day - one right after sunset, and one right before sunrise. Since the sun sets in the north-west, and Gröna Lund is due East from Kastellholmen, the sunset blue hour makes for boring photos. But the sunrise hour showed promise, and I decided to get there an hour before sunrise to, in the words of Art Lebedev, "add some red"[b] to the sky behind the park.
Sunrise was at 0421, which put the blue hour between 0321 and 0421. With some margin (and because I still wanted the sky to be dark), I wanted to start shooting at about 0300 and end at about 0400, which meant getting up at 0230, grabbing the photo kit and setting out for Kastellholmen. Which I did. This is what I saw when I got there.
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