More Colour | Weekly Photo #110
Around this time last year, while the dreaded restrictions had been temporarily relaxed here in England, I spent a few hours exploring a very quiet London with my camera. With my small 16mm F2.8 prime lens loaded onto the camera, I was traveling light and with a few hours to kill, I took a wander around the city, camera in hand to see what pictures I could find.
As you can see in the two photos above, it was a clear, sunny day, so I looked for interesting compositions while trying to minimise how much of that bright blue sky was in the frame. By the time I took the second two photos below, the sun had gone down, so the light was much softer, almost pastel-like. Those that follow my work more closely will know that the softer, less contrasty scenes like these two below are right up my street.
As I arrived back at More London, I noticed how the lights at the tip of the Shard were a pale blue colour and it was then that I ended up taking my favourite photo of the day I named “Beacon” which I have already shared in my Weekly Photos series here.
Fujifilm XT2 | XF16mm F2.8 | 16mm | 0.6 Seconds | f/9 | ISO200
After taking the photos close by the river, I decided to call it a night but as I was heading through More London Estate, towards the station, I once again found myself alone, staring up at this view of The Shard, flanked by the buildings that towered above me. I’ve seen this framed view of The Shard a thousand times before so it wasn’t that which caught my attention so much, it was the colours in the scene that held my attention long enough to get my camera back out of the bag to see if my 16mm prime lens could get the entire scene in the frame. After a quick check, I was just about in luck.
As I composed the image, I placed the Shard in the middle of the frame allowing all of those fantastic converging lines to surround it and lead the eye in and up towards the bright blue symbol of recognition of the brave people that continue to work so hard to help us through these tougher times. Playing close attention to the exposure, making sure I didn’t blow out the highlights and along with those vivid colours, I took the shot.
Having to point my camera upwards resulted in quite a lot of distortion to the vertical lines on the left and right which I needed to correct when back in Lightroom which pushed the tip of the Shard a bit too close to the top of the frame for my liking. Including a little less foreground and a little more sky or even stepping back 20-30 feet may have given me a little more room to play with but as they say, hindsight is a wonderful thing.
Trevor
This post is featured in my Weekly Photo series where I post a new photo every Monday. To have this delivered directly to your inbox, you can subscribe to the mailing list here.