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# Golden hour on the 28 tram
- URL: https://millie.ghost.preview.themeanax.com/golden-hour-on-the-28-tram/
- Published: 2026-08-30T08:30:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-06T05:50:31.000Z
- Description: Riding the old yellow tram through Lisbon in the last hour of light, with one small camera and the window pushed open.
- Author: Millie Hart
- Tags: Photography, #Import 2026-10-24 10:34

In high summer the 28 tram is a tin of sardines with a bell on it. By day it’s packed shoulder to shoulder with visitors, backpacks swinging into your face on every bend. But in the last hour before sunset, especially in spring and autumn, something changes. The crowds thin. The light drops and turns gold. And the old tram becomes the best moving camera platform in the city.

I’ve been riding it at golden hour about once a week for two years now, always with the same small camera — my Fujifilm X100V, the one I wrote about in [learning to see with one lens](https://millie.ghost.preview.themeanax.com/learning-to-see-with-one-lens/). Here’s how I do it.

## Where to get on, and where to sit

I get on at Martim Moniz, the start of the line, so I can choose my seat. The trams are the old *remodelados*: varnished wood, brass handles, wicker-and-leather seats and windows that slide down if you shove them hard enough.

The seat I want is on the right-hand side, near the back, facing forward. From there, as the tram grinds up towards Graça and then down through the Alfama, the sun sits low behind you and lights everything ahead: tiled façades, laundry lines, old men on doorsteps, the yellow paint of the tram itself reflected in shop windows.

A single ride costs a few euros if you pay on board, less with a loaded travel card. I usually ride to Estrela, get off, buy a *bica*, and catch one back the other way as the light goes pink.

## What the light does

Lisbon is a city of pale stone and painted tiles, and in golden hour it all turns warm at once. The white limestone of the pavements glows. Blue tiles go teal. The ochre walls in the Alfama turn the colour of apricot jam.

The best moments are the narrow bits, where the tram squeezes between buildings with inches to spare and the sun strikes through a gap at street level. For a second or two a single figure on the pavement is lit like a stage actor while everything around them is in shadow. That’s the picture I’m always waiting for.

Coming down past the Sé, there’s a bend where the Sé’s twin towers catch the very last sun. I have photographed that bend perhaps fifty times. I have one picture of it I like.

## Settings, for anyone who wants them

The tram moves, rattles and lurches, so I keep things simple:

- Shutter speed at 1/500 or faster, to freeze both the jolts and the people outside.
- Aperture around f/5.6, so I don’t have to fuss with focus.
- Auto ISO, capped at 3200 for when the light starts to fade.
- Exposure compensation at minus a third or two-thirds, to protect the highlights and keep the colours rich.

I shoot through the open window whenever I can. Glass adds reflections, and the old tram windows are scratched and slightly yellow — though sometimes, to be fair, that’s exactly the look I want.

> You can’t ask the tram to stop. You just have to be ready when the light and the street line up, and forgive yourself for the hundred times they don’t.

Most of the frames from these rides are blurred, crooked or full of the back of someone’s head. That’s fine. The ride itself is the point: twenty-five minutes of being carried through the city at walking pace, while the light does the work, and the conductor rings the bell at every corner as if to say, look, look, look.