3 Days in Sydney: A Photographer’s Walk-Through

Three days is not enough time to “do” Sydney, so I didn’t try. I walked it, shot it early, and let the afternoons go slow. Here’s the exact route we took — useful if you’ve got a camera and roughly the same amount of time.

Day 1 — The greatest hits, on foot

Start at the Opera House, because you’re going to anyway, then walk across the Sydney Harbour Bridge — the view back toward the sails is the one you think you’ve already seen a hundred times, and it still gets you. We carried on to Luna Park (the giant grinning face at the entrance is a gift to anyone holding a camera) and took the ferry back. Sydney is a harbor city; the ferry is not a tourist activity, it’s just the good way to travel, and it happens to hand you a moving viewpoint of the skyline for the price of a normal ticket.

Day 2 — Bondi, slowly, then a sunset ferry

Bondi Beach in the morning, a long unhurried breakfast, then the Bondi coastal walk — cliffs, pools, and more joggers in better shape than you. In the evening we went out to the Watson Bay lighthouse, then timed the ferry back for sunset so we’d catch the Opera House as the light went. That’s the move I’d repeat: don’t shoot the Opera House at midday with everyone else. Let the ferry deliver it to you at golden hour instead.

Day 3 — The one photograph, then actually relax

I got up before sunrise and walked to Mrs Macquarie’s Chair in the dark. That’s where the Opera House image I sell comes from — the tile detail up top, the part we stop seeing because we’re so used to the whole building. (The full pre-dawn story is its own post: Greetings From Sydney.) After that, we let the day off the leash — over to Manly Beach to just hang out. We’d talked about a scuba dive and skipped it; the water was cold and, honestly, sometimes you’d rather enjoy the trip than white-knuckle a dive you’ll spend all morning dreading. Dinner was in Chinatown, street tables, the most attentive service of the whole trip.

A note on how Sydney feels

We’d just come off a run of trips through Asia, and Sydney hit differently — so Western, so familiar, that it made the world feel small for a minute. A huge, buzzing city on the far side of the planet that could almost be home. Worth knowing going in: it’s an easy city to love, not a hard one to decode.

Where to point the camera (the short list)

Mrs Macquarie’s Chair at sunrise, the bridge walk looking back at the sails, the sunset ferry, and Luna Park’s face for something with a little humor in it. Shoot the details, not just the postcard — that’s usually where the actual photograph is hiding.

Speaking of postcards: the Opera House detail became Greetings From Sydney in the Postcards Collection, if you’d like the small version of a place you may or may not make it to. Start there.

— Preston