Blue hour
Twenty minutes a day when the city agrees to be photographed.
Photographers call it the blue hour and then argue about how long it lasts. In Milan in January it is twenty minutes, maybe twenty-five, between the moment the sun is properly gone and the moment the sky stops mattering. The streetlights are on but haven't won yet. Windows go warm. Everything blue deepens, and everything artificial floats on top of it like brushwork.
These frames are from a week of walking the same kilometre of the Naviglio at the same twenty minutes, which is the closest thing I have to a discipline. Same route, same lens, no exceptions for weather. The constraint is the point: when you can't choose the subject, you start actually seeing the light, which was the subject all along.
A note on these images: the studies shown here are procedural placeholders, generated from this post's own shade of the section palette, standing in until the scans come back.