We'll call it love at first night light.

Up from Florida to visit his parents, Amyn Nasser walked the Vancouver streets one summer night just as the sun was going down. He glanced at the harbor, then the river, then looked up at the city... and fell in love. "I saw the transparency of the buildings," he says, "with the sunlight behind them, lights glowing within the rooms and all that glass picking up the colors of twilight—and in that instant my breath was taken away. I was stunned. It was really a romantic moment. And I thought, I'm in trouble here. This was a city I was really attracted to. I decided to take a place here."  

Then, later in the year, as he was standing on the balcony of his apartment in the early evening, taking in the view from the 26th floor as the sun was setting and lights were coming on, he says he got the same feeling about the city—only this time he took three photographs. When he showed the images to a gallery director he'd met, she called the images "timeless and romantic," and said that he'd captured the essence of Vancouver. He began to think that maybe he was on to something, and when his stock agency, Corbis, quickly snapped up the three photos, he knew he was.

He talked to friends, made connections, got access to locations that would allow him to photograph the city from a number of angles. A penthouse apartment and hotel rooftop were key vantage points as he filled the next months with twilight images of the city of glass.

"I shot everything between the hours of 7:00 and 9:30," Amyn says, "and even the weather cooperated. We didn't get much rain at all, and the clarity of the evening light was phenomenal." Still, each evening afforded only a relatively short time for photography. "For one thing, the light changes quickly, and for another, I didn't want to wear out my welcome in the place I was shooting."

He used a tripod for every shot, of course, and most of his exposures were in the range of 30 seconds and were made using a Nikon MC-30 Remote Trigger Release on his D2X. His lenses for the project were an AF-S VR Zoom-NIKKOR 70-200mm f/2.8G IF-ED and an AF-S Zoom-NIKKOR 17-35mm f/2.8D IF-ED. All the images were shot in RAW format.

Capture NX 2 and Nik Software filters played an important part, too. He used NX 2 to correct the convergence of parallel lines that often occurs in architectural images. "There are camera and lens controls for that in NX 2—an auto distortion straighten tool and a distortion control." He also used several Nik filters, including Pro Contrast, Cross Process and Color Contrast.

The results were striking—and extraordinarily successful. "I put together a one-man gallery exhibit of 17 of the images that I printed onto aluminum sheets at up to 40x60 inches." Corbis picked up many of the images for stock sale, and then an art consultant Amyn knew presented the images to the Olympic Committee prior to the 2010 Vancouver games. "They were accepted for display at the Olympic Village during the games, and six prints were exhibited," he says. Amyn also received a commitment from the Smithsonian Institution for a six-month display of one of the aluminum prints at the Smithsonian Castle.

Though he says he might add a few more Vancouver night shots to the collection, he considers the project pretty much completed, and he's likely to be moving on. "I'm thinking of someplace warm," Amyn says. "Maybe Arizona."

Where some night, in some city, he might fall in love all over again.  

You can see a selection of Amyn's images at his website.