Norte
Porto is a two-bank city and the two banks are never good at the same time. From the Gaia quayside the whole Ribeira facade is lit from the front between about eight and eleven in the morning; from Ribeira itself, Gaia and the port lodges take the last two hours of sun. A session that wants both is a session that needs the upper deck of the Luís I and about ten minutes to walk across it — worth knowing that the upper deck carries the metro, so you are walking beside a live line, not on a footbridge. The rest is interiors, and interiors here are where the constraints live. São Bento is free and extraordinary and is also a working station busy from eight. Livraria Lello charges admission and restricts photography, and the policy has changed more than once — it is checked before it is promised, never after.
Porto gets Atlantic weather and more of it than the south: the wet months are genuinely wet, and a session in December is planned with an indoor alternative rather than hoped through. June to September is reliable and the evenings are long. Late September into October is the best combination of light, temperature and an empty Ribeira, and it overlaps the Douro harvest an hour upriver.
Here is where to shoot in Porto, with ideal times and permit notes.
The frame of Porto that everyone recognises, and the only place to take it with the light on the front of the buildings rather than behind them. Empty early; by midday it is a queue for the rabelo boats.
Narrow, north-west facing, and in shadow all morning. It comes alive late, and the facades take a colour at seven in the evening that no amount of editing reproduces at noon.
The connection between the two halves of the city and a viewpoint in its own right. The walkway runs alongside a live metro track, so it is a place to stand still rather than to arrange people across.
Twenty thousand azulejos in a room the size of a church, and trains leaving from the platform behind it. Ten minutes at seven in the morning is worth an hour at any other time.
Where the river meets the Atlantic, fifteen minutes down the marginal. Open west, so it is the one part of Porto with an uninterrupted horizon and a sunset that does not go behind a building.
These come under the Porto rate: a photographer travels out from the city at no extra charge, and the session is priced exactly as it would be in Porto itself.
Gaia in the morning, Ribeira in the evening. If you only have one session and it is in the afternoon, start in Ribeira and finish on the bridge; if it is in the morning, do the reverse. A session that tries to do both at noon gets neither.
It charges admission and restricts photography, and the terms have changed more than once. It is checked at the time of booking rather than assumed, and if the answer is no there are better staircases in the city that cost nothing.