Ximending Taipei Night Photography
If you want to understand the energy of Taipei at night, go to Ximending. Not to the quiet tea houses or the temple courtyards, but to the main junction in the heart of the entertainment district, around eight or nine in the evening, and just stand there for a minute and take it in. The animated billboards covering entire building facades, the neon signs stacked five and six deep on every block, the streams of people moving in every direction, the food stalls and the music and the general sense that the city has been turned up to a volume that most cities do not even know exists.
Ximending Taipei night photography is its own particular discipline. The light levels are high enough by night market standards that you have real options, but the range of brightness between the darkest parts of the street and the lit billboard faces is so extreme that getting a balanced exposure requires some thought. I shot these images in the blue hour window, just after the sky has gone dark but before it loses all its colour, because that residual deep blue in the sky above the buildings anchors the frame in a way that pure black sky does not.
The main junction is anchored on the left by a large curved white building with the H&M logo visible at street level, and on the right by a series of buildings stacked with screens and signs. The centrepiece, on the evening we were there, was a massive anime billboard covering the entire face of a four-storey building, the characters vivid and enormous against the surrounding signage. The scale of it, seen from street level, is genuinely surprising.
What I found most interesting about Ximending as a photography subject was the way it sits somewhere between Tokyo and Times Square without quite being either. The Japanese cultural influence on the signage and the entertainment offering is obvious, particularly in the gaming and pop culture shops that line the main street. But the density of it, the way it is compressed into a relatively small number of blocks, is distinctly Taiwanese.
The crowds at Ximending on a weekend evening are extraordinary. Every nationality, every age group, families with small children and teenagers in elaborate fashion and tourists with cameras, all moving through the same streets in the same good-natured, slightly chaotic way. It is a place that is very easy to spend several hours in without noticing the time, which is exactly how the best night photography locations tend to work.
If you are visiting Taipei and you have any interest in urban night photography, Ximending should be on your list alongside the night markets. The two are different experiences, the markets are street food and local life, Ximending is entertainment and commerce and spectacle, and both are worth your time and your camera.
