The photo survived last call. My saddle did not.
Field Notes · Prague, Czech Republic · 2026-05-26

Surviving potholes, broken crystal, and drunk composition critics to bring home one frame of Old Town Square.

This trip had two jobs: a cheap detour to the Nachtmann factory to replace the crystal my son shattered, since careful is absent from his vocabulary, and a standard architectural run through Prague. Instead, Central Europe cooked.

Not one to be talked out of my crazy plans, I booked a campground with electricity to run the Dometic RTX 2000, loaded the e-bikes, the boys, and the dog, and pointed the bumper toward the former Eastern Bloc.

Before leaving, I pre-built a custom Prague city guide web app so I could road test it and capture live foot-traffic footage. It worked flawlessly. On a schedule with no slack, pre-mapped coordinates are the difference between shooting and searching. My Venice city guide is already live. Prague is next.

Rolling into the Czech Republic, the sky was already showing off, hours before showtime, like a burlesque dancer taunting the front row. I pulled into a gas station just to catch the light and bagged an artsy frame of a lone streetlight over a glowing self-service fuel kiosk. I drove away convinced I had just shot the best sky of the week.

Rolling into the Czech Republic, the sky was already showing off...

The campground was central, spotless, run by the local yacht club, and governed by one iron rule: no vehicles in or out after hours.

Enter the e-bikes.

Prague's ancient cobblestone roads are holier than the Pontiff himself. By day three I was so saddle-sore I swore off bicycles for life. The navigation was its own hazing. Prague has plenty of dedicated bike trails; few of them exist on Google Maps. You have to use Mapy, which routes you in ways no sane local would ride. At one point it dumped our entire crew onto a roaring highway. We dismounted on the spot, walked the bikes back into a train station, rode the escalator down, and slipped out the back through a quiet public park.

The heat never let up. We toured Communist-era nuclear bunkers for the air conditioning and told ourselves it was for the history. The van AC earned its keep every night.

What nobody tells you about Prague: at 4:00 a.m. the streets are still full, and no one out at that hour is sober. While I stood at my tripod working out the eerie, quiet scale of Old Town Square, a group of drunk young men gathered around to supervise. They had opinions. I had a shutter release and limited patience.

The frame outlasted them. It is called Vigil, and the curators at 1x have since published it, which is a nicer review than the one I got in the square.

Between the bar crowds, hauling a heavy e-bike up the brutal incline to Letenský Profil, and the heat, Prague made me earn every single frame. But when the Town Hall tower locks into the viewfinder and the last red light settles over the square, the sweat and the sore saddle vanish.

And the crystal factory? We made it, on the way back, on about two hours of sleep. We found a lakeside campground for the night, where I was so fried I was certain I had paid for electrical hookups. I had not. I spent a confused hour diagnosing a power system whose only fault was me, and got as far as pricing a replacement component before deciding it could wait until morning.

I am glad I waited. That evening I walked down to the water and caught the best sky of the entire trip. The gas station never stood a chance.

Sherry (battered knees, melted tires, worth every crown)

Behind the Lens and Collection Notes

Location: Old Town Square, Prague, Czech Republic
Work: Vigil

The Scene: Prague's Old Town as night turns over. The Town Hall tower has kept the city's time for six hundred years, and here it does what it has always done: stands watch while the light burns down to its last red over the square, the Týn spires holding the far edge of the frame.

The Work: A blue hour study of the square's architecture under a burning sky, with the tower as the anchor and the warm lamplit facades carrying the eye across the frame. Reviewed and published by the curators at 1x. Produced at large scale for high-end residential interiors, luxury corporate collections, and contemporary hospitality spaces.

Available by inquiry only.

This limited-edition work is available as a museum-quality archival pigment print or a premium face-mounted acrylic. Commercial licensing is available for high-end interior designers, corporate art consultants, and international design publications.

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