After debating going downtown Friday evening to shoot the new Christmas lights on the Riverwalk in San Antonio (decided against it, fighting the crowds did not seem like a good idea on the first night) a friend and I did a sort of impromptu photo-walk around the "tourist" portion of the Riverwalk last night. It wasn't terribly cold, but toward the end of the night, the wind started to pick up and definitely started to feel much cooler than it was earlier in the night.
This shot was taken on the bridge over the Riverwalk on Market Street. After trying to figure out the "perfect" way to get as much into the shot as possible, finally had an idea, tried it, and this was the result, exactly what I had in my mind framing wise!
The lights are wrapped around the trees this year, rather than hanging from branches in years past, and they are all LED, rather than the bulbs that were used in previous years. The city also finally realized that having every third light be pink or red ended up casting a reddish hue and made the entire light display look red and very unattractive.
The display is definitely much better than last year, but I do not think it is worth of being the "8th best Christmas light display in the country", as a Yahoo! travel article recently suggested. The reason for my feelings on that are:
- many of the downtown structures that had Christmas lighting (the taller Marriott hotel, the Tower Life Building, etc.) ended up turning off their lights around midnight, which doesn't make it very attractive
- the city did not take the time to actually look at views on the Riverwalk of many of the aforementioned structures, they seemed to care more about wrapping seemingly random trees in lights, and did not take in to account what a "scene" could end up looking like
- there are not nearly enough lights. If the amount of trees containing lights was doubled (probably tripled) it would definitely be better. The LEDs are bright, certainly, but this is the only spot on the entire riverwalk where every tree that you can see is covered in lights. One single vantage point, on the entire Riverwalk, does not a high ranking Christmas destination make.
With all of that being said, the display is much, much better than last year, hopefully the city continues to look at and explore options to make it more of a "must-see" Christmas light destination. If they actually end up increasing the amount of trees that are covered, I just might come back in future years to visit. If you live in the area it is definitely worth a trip downtown, but I am sure there are much better places to see closer to home for tourists that would not otherwise travel to the city.
Riverwalk Christmas Lights
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