Sometimes you want something in your photos, but you have a hard time finding it exactly. For me, I wanted to capture the essence of Stockholm but I had a hard time finding the right place to see it. Stockholm is an amazing city, with a breathtaking combination of modern Scandinavian architecture mixed with classic European castles and buildings. But Stockholm’s most notable feature is also its most striking – the entire city sits on an archipelago of 14 islands next to the sea.

When traveling with your camera, it often helps to know the phase of the moon. That said, if you’re not a walking moon phase calendar, simply paying attention to your surroundings can be a good fallback. Such was the case for me one night before I took this photo when I happened to look out the windows of the Google office and see an almost full moon rising over downtown. I immediately opened PhotoPills, saw that the full moon was the next night, and began formulating a plan.