This is Toledo at night... not Ohio, the cool one. You know, Alcázar, the Cathedral, the Tagus.
Like most any city at night, there’s lots of lights, streets, parking lots, major buildings, where the tourists & rich people hang out.
There are dark areas too, in this case not only where the poor people hang out, but the scenic/rugged terrain down to the Tagus,
which I think is very much part of Toledo’s appeal.
When you want to take a picture of something dark, you use a flash.
Of course you’d need an atomic bomb to flash the whole city, and that would be kind of counterproductive.
Enter the Photographic Association of Toledo, with not a big flash, but lots of small ones.
Dividing the city up into zones, with lots of experimentation, and lots of HDR gigabytes in Photoshop, they ended up with this.
If you look closely at the
really big picture, you can see the people with the lights, and even a couple in a boat near the bottom center.
And read the
whole process here.