The Impossible Length of Autumn Bicycle Shadows

It's that season again. We're transitioning into winter. It's hard to describe Nordic light. It changes radically throughout the year and has a thousand variations. All beautiful. In autumn - and spring - there are many signals that we're changing seasons. One of them is the growing length of the shadows as the sun hangs lower in the sky.

Shadows become impossibly long.

So long that it sometimes feels like they wrap around the whole world and you have to chase yourself down the cycle tracks.

The morning light is crisper and sharper than ever. Your shadow follows you along as you squint into the sunrise.

Shadows of this length make you contemplate yourself and your size on the urban landscape.

You're often much larger than life.

The quality of the light offers up shadows that are sharply defined around the edges.



You often can't help but notice yourself on the urban landscape.

Sometimes your shadow chases you, sometimes you follow your shadow through the city.

The length of time it takes to overtake another bicycle user increases drastically when your shadows are this long.



Nordic light and it's accompanying shadows are timeless. Here a famous photograph from Tage Christiansen during the 1940s.

You've Got Heart

Today is the day of hearts, and we don't want to be left out. A quick serach for "heart" in our photo archives gave us these shots. Although every day is heart-y in Denmark when your coins are decked out with them:

Big ol' heart on Nørrebrogade, the world's busiest bicycle street.

Hearts under your bum.

Heart-shaped bell and condom from a Belgian campaign Velove from a few years back. "My bike loves me", it reads.

A lovely street in Barcelona.


And we couldn't forget this shot, now could we?

Have a love-filled day.

A Shadow of our Future Selves

Living in a Nordic city, you get to experience wild shadows throughout the year. Okay, shadows are perhaps not "wild" but the length of the shadows is one of our surest indicators of season. The longer they get, the closer to winter we are or, as is the case right now, the shorter they get, then spring is on the way.

As is so often the case, we sit down to write a blogpost and then it morphs into a larger theme.

Looking through our archives we realised that shadows have featured prominently over the past five years. Aren't shadows lovely? And when combined with the very aesthetic bicycle, all manner of visual pleasure is to be had.


The shot at left gives you a good indication of the length of winter shadows in northern climes. A person on a bicycle is as long as a truck in the late afternoon. You either chase your shadow or it follows you like a puppy.


Onesome or twosome? Twosome or foursome?

Sometimes your shadows are so long they wrap around the world and you can see the end of it just ahead of you on the cycle track.

This is a rather famous photograph, taken during the Second World War by the photographer Tage Christiansen. He has always been a source of inspiration for me, not least because of his bicycle shots. It's hard to say what time of year this photo was taken but it's either early spring or late autumn, based on the length of the shadows.



Aerial cycle chic with shadows.


Shadows make the world topsy-turvy.


Nobody says shadows have to lie down on the job.

Nobody says that you even need daylight.


Here's a photoset with all our shadowy photographs featuring bicycles:

Long Winters Bring Long Shadows

We're looking forward to long shadows today. This one from January 25th, 2007.

Vesterbro Nights

My friend Sille (the owner of the Invisible Cycle Chic bicycle) and I were playing around in the Vesterbro neighbourhood one evening. We may or may not have consumed red wine.

We may or may not have had the camera on the correct settings for shooting at night. We did have bicycles, though. That's my Velorbis - posing like it knows there's a (blurry) camera around.