The Best (and Secret) Location for Photography in Denver, Colorado

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This beautiful image is my all-time bestseller, but I’m particularly proud of it. Not just because it is my best performer overall. But because of the secret location I found in Denver, Colorado to capture the perfect skyline with the Rocky Mountains in the background.

Experienced photographers will see something wrong with it. And I’ll probably hear about it in the comments. If you do, share it with your friends and see if they can spot it. But, it has nothing to do with the location. I had visited Denver, Colorado several times and tried to find just the right place to get the skyline and Rockys, but never quite found what I was looking for.

Every city with a skyline also has some places from which to capture that skyline. Some are well known, such as the skyline of Manhattan from Brooklyn Bridge Park or Atlanta’s view from the Jackson Street Bridge. You might capture Chicago from across Lake Michigan, or at least from the shore, maybe in Millennium Park. For Seattle, you want to be on Queen Anne Hill in Kerry Park.

And then there are secret places in each city that photographers know like hidden fishing spots in a river. Photographers can be very secretive about their favorite spots. I asked a photographer whose class I was attending where he took a particular Denver, Colorado skyline shot from. His answer was, “Someplace high.”

I'll let you in on one in Atlanta. Go to the top of the parking deck at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Look to the south.

Your welcome.

But I’m not going to keep this place in Denver, Colorado secret. I will tell you exactly where to go to grab this shot of the Denver skyline with City Park in the foreground and the Rocky Mountains in the background. It has the perfect combination of angle and elevation.

I will give you the location, but it’s going to cost you. Not to me, unless you want to buy a print (from the cleverly included link in the attribute below the image). No, it will cost you, $18.95 which is how much it costs to get into the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. It’s a beautiful museum well worth spending at least half a day in. And you can capture this skyline image by…

But first, a little history about natural history museums. I visited my first one on my second trip to New York City in 1986. The American Museum of Natural History is an absolute must-see. It will cost you about $23. It used to be ‘free’ when I was there, but on the way out, Guido would ask you for a ‘donation.’

Anyway, this was back in my film days, and of course, I had my camera with me. I knew enough about lighting to understand that any image I took inside under artificial light would look horrible. This is before you could change white balance with the flip of a switch. You had to actually buy film specific to the lighting and change it out, wasting what was on the remainder of the roll. There was also no Photoshop to fix bad lighting in post-processing

So, while walking through the fantastic dioramas, I knew better than to waste expensive film and processing on a shot that wouldn’t be useful but fired off one of a pride of lions in the African Savannah.

The image turned out beautifully. I then realized that the museum had used daylight-balanced lighting for the displays and mentally kicked myself for the missed opportunities.

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Fast forward 30 years, and there I am, focusing on a different lion in another museum, when I hear, “Excuse me, sir.”

In my experience, nothing good ever follows, “Excuse me, sir.” I turn to see a huge security guard.

“Are you a photographer?”

I have found that the huge camera around my neck will frequently give me away.

“Yes, I am.”

“Would you come with me, please?”

Also, in my experience, the only thing worse than “Excuse me, sir” is, “Would you come with me, please.”

I follow the guard into the next room, where he points to a different diorama, this one containing a moose in the wilds of Canada. “This is our most popular exhibit for photographers. I didn’t want you to miss it.”

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Never assume.

Anyway, we wander from room to room, taking in the fantastic exhibits, frequently getting lost and separated until I end up in the back of level 3, where I see a sign that says, “Elevator to Sky Terrace.” Ahhh, you know where I’m heading next, right?

I don’t recall the purpose of the terrace. I’m sure it had some neat sciencey stuff. But what caught my eye was the skyline of Denver, looking something like this.

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The light was pretty bad, but I saw potential and took several shots.

Back at home, while post-processing, I did some of my usual magic working on the light, contrast, and colors until I had an image I was happy with.

Almost.

The sky was just dull. I had taken a lot of the haze out of the mountains and could crop out most of the sky, but I decided to replace it. This was in 2016, and my sky replacement skills were pretty new. But the mountains gave me a clean horizon, so the masking wasn’t too tedious. I then selected a lovely blue sky with puffy clouds from my sky library and replaced it.

Much better, but I decided to push it a bit. Knowing I was looking west (you can always find west in Denver), I decided to go for sunset. The result is the image above and below. It is vibrant and full of color.

It is also horribly wrong.

Have you seen it yet?

Now, you science nerds may have decided that looking west from Denver at sunset; the sun should be slightly to the southwest, not the northwest as in this picture. And if you did, kudos for that, but almost no one has told me about that one.

No, what I have heard about a thousand times is how the sun in the west is casting shadows pointing north. This shot was taken right around lunchtime, which in the northern hemisphere means the sun is almost due south.

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Don’t do that.

There is a lot to replacing a sky other than the work involved in modifying the picture. You have to choose the right sky. The light should be similar to what’s in the image. A bright blue mid-day sky over a photo taken during the golden hour of the afternoon won’t work. But more than that, you have to check the directionality of the light. The shadows have to match up with the sun’s location.

But none of that matters if you don't capture the image in the first place. And to do that, you need the proper location. That location in Denver, Colorado is on the Sky Terrace at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science

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