Shooting in Prague almost always has the same rhythm. You set out, walk the city for three hours, and at some point you realise your hands are cold, your card is full and you would really love to sit down somewhere.
I used to solve it by looking for a café near every spot. It sounds logical, but it doesn’t work. One place happens to be closed, the next makes coffee you wouldn’t bother stopping for, and the one good café is a twenty-minute walk back across the river.
Then I turned it round. I don’t look for a café to match the spot. I pick one café and shoot in circles around it. It doesn’t move; I do. Between two spots I can get back to it within a few minutes instead of starting the search again every time.
Looking through the photos starts with coffee
For the centre of Prague I ended up with one address: SmetanaQ Café & Bistro on Smetanovo nábřeží, on the ground floor of a building a short walk from the National Theatre. When I measured the straight-line distance from it to all the spots in my guide, it came out even better than I expected. Most Legií 160 metres, Slovanský ostrov 198, Střelecký ostrov 209, the Babies on Kampa 430, Křižovnické náměstí 475, Charles Bridge 513, the náplavka embankment 572 and the Astronomical Clock 760 metres. Within a 900-metre radius there are fourteen spots from the guide, within a kilometre and a half twenty-nine.
That alone wouldn’t be enough — you could find more addresses placed like that in the centre. One detail decided it: the opening hours. Many good Prague cafés close around six. SmetanaQ is open until nine in the evening from Monday to Thursday, until ten on Friday and Saturday and until eight on Sunday.
It sounds like a small thing. When you’re shooting the sunset, it isn’t.
For every day of 2026 I took the time of sunset, added fifteen minutes to get there and compared the result with the opening hours for that day of the week. It came to 301 days out of 365 when you can photograph the sunset and then still sit down. On Fridays and Saturdays it even works around the summer solstice, when the sun sets after nine. You shoot the sunset from most Legií and three minutes later you can be sitting at a table.
In the morning it works differently. The café opens at nine, so it won’t serve as a starting point before dawn. But by the river you can shoot from first light, walk Střelecký or Slovanský ostrov and head to SmetanaQ after shooting. You have a coffee, warm your hands and calmly look through what you managed to catch.
In the evening SmetanaQ is the base, in the morning the destination. And in both cases it offers exactly what a photographer needs after a few hours in Prague: good coffee, warmth and time to go through a full card.