The Four Seasons Seattle, Seattle: Suits and Does Not Suit
The Thompson Seattle, Seattle: The Light Through the Day
The overcast is not the problem. It is the light.
The thing to understand about photographing in Seattle is that the grey is not weather to be endured. It is the light, and it is very good light.
The Thompson Seattle is a glass hotel of around a dozen storeys near the downtown waterfront, opened in the mid-twenty-tens, with a rooftop bar at the top of it and Elliott Bay immediately to the west. It is modern throughout: floor-to-ceiling glazing, pale interiors, no period detail, and a view that is the main event.
Two conditions govern the light here and neither is about the building.
The first is the marine overcast. Seattle gets something in the region of two hundred and twenty-five days a year with substantial cloud and about a hundred and fifty with measurable precipitation, most of it light drizzle over long periods rather than heavy rain over short ones. The annual rainfall total is actually lower than Atlanta’s — what the city has is days, not volume.
So for most of the year between October and May, the dominant condition is a high, even, continuous overcast. That is a softbox the size of the sky, and through a glass wall it becomes the most forgiving portrait light in this library: soft to non-existent shadows, even illumination at any hour, no bad time of day, and skin tones that need almost no work. Photographers who arrive hoping for sun and treat the overcast as a failure produce worse photographs than ones who plan for it.
What it costs is contrast and sky. A flat white overcast contributes nothing to a wide frame, and through a window it is simply a bright blank rectangle. The answer is to exclude it — fill the frame, put the horizon high, use the water and the city rather than the ceiling, and let colour and texture carry the picture instead of tone.
The second condition is the latitude, which at about forty-seven and a half degrees north is the highest of any city in this collection and produces the largest seasonal swing in it. In late June the sun sets after nine, the noon sun reaches about sixty-six degrees, and civil twilight runs close to thirty-seven minutes. In late December the sun is gone by half past four, the noon sun never rises above about nineteen degrees, and there are about eight and a half hours of daylight.
Those are two different venues, and a schedule that works in July is wrong in January by four and a half hours. The other latitude effect is less obvious and catches people out: the sun’s setting azimuth swings enormously here, from well north of west in midsummer to well south of west in midwinter. Which facade gets the last light therefore changes by season, by a wide margin. A position scouted in July may be in shade on a January date.
Hour by hour, and season by season, it runs as follows.
The Thompson Seattle at a glance
| Where | A glass hotel of about a dozen storeys near the Seattle waterfront |
| The dominant light | A high marine overcast — a softbox the size of the sky |
| The cost | No sky worth including; exclude it and fill the frame |
| The latitude | Forty-seven and a half north: a thirty-seven minute midsummer dusk, and an early winter one |
| Ask first | Which way your rooms face, and the rooftop terms and wind policy |
Morning and the middle of the day
On an overcast morning — which is most mornings for two thirds of the year — a room with a glass wall is about as good as an interior gets, and the technique is almost nothing.
Put the subject side-on to the glass, a metre and a half back, and work. The light is soft, even, directional in the broad sense that it comes from one side, and it wraps because the source is enormous. There is no beam to manage, no shadow to fill, no dappling, and no hour at which it changes character. A whole morning of preparation coverage can be made on that alone.
Two refinements. The light is cool — both because an overcast sky is a cool source and because modern glazing is coated to reject heat, which shifts transmitted daylight cooler and often slightly green. That compounds, so interiors here photograph noticeably bluer than the eye remembers. Warm the whole block consistently rather than frame by frame, and set a white balance for the position you are shooting from, because a subject at the glass and one five metres back are lit by measurably different colour.
And on a high floor there is no ground bounce. At street level, light from the sky hits paving and returns upward into a face as free fill; a dozen storeys up there is much less of that, so eye sockets and the underside of the jaw go darker than the nominal brightness suggests. A white card at waist height fixes it immediately once it is recognised.
On the rarer clear morning the same room behaves completely differently. An east-facing high floor with no obstruction takes a hard low beam through the glass and lays a sharp-edged rectangle across the floor, four or five stops above everything out of it. That makes one kind of picture very easy — subject in the beam, expose for the beam, let the room go black — and every other kind impossible. Close the sheers for working light and use the beam for one or two deliberate frames.
The middle of the day is where the high latitude helps rather than hurts, and this is a real difference from the southern venues in this library. A midsummer noon sun at sixty-six degrees is a full seventeen degrees lower than the Gulf South equivalent, which means it still has direction in it: it models a face rather than flattening it, and it comes into a vertical window rather than skimming over the top of it.
So a clear midday in July here is usable outdoors in a way that a clear midday in Louisiana is not. Open shade works, a hat is not mandatory, and a portrait in the street at one in the afternoon is a reasonable proposition. That is worth knowing because it widens the day considerably.
In winter the middle of the day is the whole of the day. A nineteen-degree noon sun rakes everything — buildings, faces, water — at an angle that would be golden hour anywhere else, and it does so from eleven until three. On a clear winter day in Seattle the entire afternoon is the best light of the year. The catch is that most winter days are not clear, and that the levels are low: a nineteen-degree sun behind an overcast is dim as well as soft.
The practical instruction for the daytime block is to plan around the glass rather than around the clock. Establish which way the rooms you have been given actually face, because in a building where the windows are the source, aspect matters more than hour. A west-facing room is a soft even light all morning and a strong directional one late; an east-facing room is the reverse. Ask the hotel, in writing, which rooms you have.
Reflections are a constant in a glass building and worth one note. A glass wall with a bright exterior and dimmer interior reflects the room back at you, so a wide frame including the window contains a ghost of the furniture, the stands and possibly you. Move off the glass axis, get close to the pane, or compose the reflection deliberately. A polariser helps less than photographers hope, because you are nearly perpendicular to the surface.
Late afternoon, the rooftop and the water
The second half of the day is where the building’s position pays for itself, and the reason is the direction it faces.
Downtown Seattle sits above Elliott Bay with open water to the west, and beyond that water the Olympic Mountains stand as a long serrated ridge. So the western horizon from a downtown height is water, then mountains, then sky — with no near obstruction at all. That is an unusually complete sunset composition and it is available without leaving the building.
The water behaves as a scatterer rather than a mirror, because it is open and moving, so it holds a soft luminous sheen instead of a reflection and stays visibly brighter than the land for a long while after the sun has gone. The mountains go to a flat silhouette early, which is useful: they give the frame a hard lower edge under the sky.
On a clear evening, the last half hour before sunset gives a long low warm beam straight in through the west glazing, and because the coated glass cools everything slightly, the result is a gold rather than an orange. Place the subject side-on with the sun off to one side rather than directly behind them; with the sun in the glass you are shooting into flare and a veiled low-contrast frame.
On an overcast evening there is no beam and no visible sunset, and the frame to make instead is the city. Once the ambient drops, downtown becomes a field of warm lit windows against a grey-blue sky, the wet streets below hold reflections, and the water goes to pewter. That is a genuinely good photograph and it is the one available on most evenings of the year, so it should be the default plan rather than the fallback.
Then the rooftop, which is why a hotel like this is chosen.
A bar a dozen storeys up on the western edge of downtown has real sky, real ambient, no glazing cast and a true horizon — all four of which the interior lacks. It is worth a great deal and it needs two things established in writing well before the date.
The first is what a wedding actually gets. A rooftop bar is a business with its own customers, and the answer may be the whole space, part of it, or a twenty-minute window in a corner. That is a commercial question with a real answer and it should not be discovered on the day, because a rooftop frame promised and then unavailable is the one failure a couple will remember.
The second is wind. At this height on an exposed western edge above open water, a marine westerly is materially stronger than at street level, and it is a regular condition here rather than an occasional one. A veil in that is unmanageable and a lightstand is a hazard. Sandbag everything, and tell the couple in advance that on some evenings the veil will not come up. Nobody minds being told.
Ask also about the weather policy, because roofs close, and in this city they close often.
Then the balance point, which at this latitude is the most generous in this collection. Civil twilight runs close to thirty-seven minutes in midsummer, and the genuinely useful window — where the sky and the city lights are within a stop of each other so both hold detail in one frame — runs perhaps eighteen to twenty minutes. That is nearly double what the Gulf South gives you, and it is enough for two or three positions rather than one.
Use it properly. Two frames on the roof and one back inside against the glass is achievable inside that window if the positions are decided in advance. Light the couple, because at any exposure that holds the city the ambient will not expose a face: one small warmed source on a stand, close, at low power, set up before the window rather than during it.
In December the same window arrives before half past five, which means it lands during cocktails rather than after dinner. That has to be on the timeline explicitly as a named twenty minutes, or it will be missed while everyone is being seated.
The city outside, and the year
Two things about Seattle’s geography make the exteriors better than a downtown block usually is, and both are glacial.
The hills here are the leftovers of an ice lobe that pushed down this trough and withdrew, so downtown is built on genuinely steep ground with the street grid laid across it without much concession. A subject standing uphill of the camera is separated from their background by geometry alone, with no depth of field required; a subject downhill has the street stacking up behind them. Neither is available in a flat city and both are a block’s walk away.
The steepness also means the west-running streets are sightlines to the water. From partway up a block you are looking over the rooftops below and down to Elliott Bay, which makes a street-end frame with water in it available on foot, without needing the rooftop at all. Find two of those on a scout; they are the wet-weather and no-roof-access fallback and they are genuinely good.
The waterfront itself is a working one, with piers, ferries and container traffic, which is honest and photogenic — a ferry crossing behind a subject at dusk is a strong and very specific frame, and the ferries run frequently enough to be relied on rather than hoped for.
Wet is the material to use in this city and it should be planned for rather than tolerated. Drizzle saturates brick, stone, steel, paving and foliage, and wet surfaces are more saturated and more three-dimensional than dry ones. A Seattle street in light rain photographs better than the same street dry, and wet paving under city lights gives a free second image. Carry a cloth for the front element and work.
July and August are the dry season, which visitors find surprising. They are reliably sunny, warm rather than hot, and the air is clear — genuinely the most dependable outdoor conditions of the year, which is why the city’s wedding season is compressed into a narrow window and why those dates book first.
Two honest cautions about late summer. Since the late twenty-tens, August and September have brought wildfire smoke from Cascade and British Columbia fires with some regularity. Smoke gives an orange low-contrast light that some people like, and it also gives genuinely poor air quality that makes an outdoor event inadvisable. It cannot be forecast far out, so a late-August rooftop plan needs an indoor alternative for air quality as well as for rain.
And Mount Rainier. It stands some ninety kilometres to the south-east and is visible from the city only when the air is clear, perhaps a third of days and mostly in summer. Never promise a couple a frame with Rainier in it. If it appears, shoot it immediately, because it will go.
October through May is the soft season and it is better than its reputation. Even light all day, no bad hour, and deep saturated green — this is evergreen country, with Douglas fir, western red cedar and western hemlock keeping dark mass through the winter, and moss on trunks, walls and roofs at its most vivid in the wet months. A February frame here has more colour in it than a February frame almost anywhere else in this collection, which is the opposite of the usual seasonal advice.
Cherry blossom arrives in late March and rhododendron, the state flower, from April into June, so the spring shoulder has genuine colour on top of the soft light.
Winter’s real constraint is not cold — it is mild here, rarely freezing hard — but darkness. Eight and a half hours of daylight, much of it overcast, means the usable outdoor window on a December day runs from about nine to about half past three, and the balance point falls before half past five. A winter wedding here is an interiors wedding with one short outdoor window, and the honest plan is to use that window deliberately for everything outdoors rather than discovering at four that it has gone.
The one instruction that covers the whole year: in a building where the windows are the light, find out which way your rooms face, treat the overcast as the light rather than the problem, exclude the white sky, and put the balance-point window on the timeline with a name against it — eighteen generous minutes in July, and before dinner in December.
More frames from The Thompson Seattle
The Thompson Seattle wedding photography: common questions
Is the Seattle overcast bad for photographs?
No — it is the light, and it is very forgiving. Seattle has around two hundred and twenty-five cloudy days a year but a lower annual rainfall total than Atlanta: what it has is days, not volume, and mostly light drizzle. A high even overcast is a softbox the size of the sky, which through a glass wall gives soft shadows, even light at any hour, no bad time of day and easy skin tones. What it costs is sky, so exclude it: fill the frame, put the horizon high, and let colour and texture carry the picture.
Why do the interiors look blue?
Two effects compound. An overcast sky is a cool source, and modern high-performance glazing is coated to reject heat, which shifts transmitted daylight cooler and often slightly green. So a room lit through glass on a grey day photographs noticeably bluer than the eye remembers. Warm the whole block consistently rather than frame by frame, and set a white balance for the position you are shooting from, since a subject at the glass and one five metres back are lit by different colour.
How long is the dusk window here?
The most generous in this collection. Civil twilight runs close to thirty-seven minutes in midsummer, of which the genuinely useful balance point — where the sky and the city lights are within a stop of each other — lasts eighteen to twenty minutes. That is nearly double the Gulf South and it is enough for two or three positions rather than one. In December the same window arrives before half past five, so it falls during cocktails and has to be a named item on the timeline.
What should we ask about the rooftop?
What a wedding actually gets, in writing — the whole space, part of it, or a short window in a corner — because it is a bar with its own customers. And the wind policy, because at this height on an exposed western edge above open water a marine westerly is a regular condition rather than an occasional one, strong enough to make a veil unmanageable and a lightstand a hazard. Also ask the weather policy, because roofs close and in this city they close often.
Can we get Mount Rainier in our photographs?
Do not count on it. Rainier is ninety kilometres to the south-east and visible from the city only when the air is clear — perhaps a third of days, concentrated in summer. Nobody should be promised it. If it is out on the day, shoot it in the first minute you notice, because it will go.
When is the best time of year?
July and August, which are genuinely the dry season here: reliably sunny, warm rather than hot, clear air, and the longest twilight in this collection. They book first for that reason. Two cautions — late August and September now bring wildfire smoke with some regularity, so an air-quality contingency matters as much as a rain one; and a December wedding here is an interiors wedding with one short outdoor window between about nine and half past three. The soft season from October to May is better than its reputation, with even light all day and saturated evergreen and moss at their most vivid.
More Seattle, WA venue guides
We are writing a photographer’s guide to every venue we would happily shoot in Seattle, WA. Here are three more, plus the full index:
- The Four Seasons Seattle, Seattle: Suits and Does Not Suit
- The Seattle Aquarium, Seattle: The One Decision That Governs Everything
- The Seattle Art Museum, Seattle: A Walk Through the Building
Planning a wedding at The Thompson Seattle?
Which way do your rooms face, and when? Tell us your date.
