Seattle Skyline

The view of Seattle’s downtown core from the adjacent sleepy West Seattle, just across the Puget Sound, has always been one of my favorites. While the famed Kerry Park view places the Space Needle neatly amidst and above our skyscrapers, Seattlelites and frequent visitors alike know this popular snapshot to be only a picture postcard impression of the city’s true character.

In fact, water—not the Space Needle—is the life of our city, and our downtown has been built around it. Upon its founding, Seattle’s earliest European settlers dreamed of building a bustling port city here, later going so far as to construct the man-made Harbor Island in support of the rising volume of shipments by sea.

Over the course of a century, numerous Seattle landmarks—Smith Tower, Pike Place Market, Columbia Center—sprung up alongside the water and in their time stamped their own image of this city on the world map. The view from West Seattle’s Alki beach, presenting all this history in a single frame, serves as a testament to their vision.

On July 3, 2019, when the cloud coverage and new moon were at their most perfect combination, I set up camp on Alki beach to capture the city at night, in all its frenetic glow. In the hour-long shoot, I captured 48 sets of bracketed exposures (144 images altogether) and stitched them together as an HDR panorama.

The resulting composite photo stretches more than seven feet long at 300dpi and is mounted on Artmill’s floating glass.