Isle of Dogs | Weekly Photo #86
I hope you are all enjoying the mix of urban and natural landscapes I’ve been sharing lately. When I first started this weekly photo series, the vast majority of the photos I took and subsequently shared were of London but at the start of last year, those visits into the city slowed to a crawl and whilst I miss my trips uptown and can’t wait for them to start again, I’ve really enjoyed getting out into the natural landscape which, in these current times is far more accessible to me.
Fujifilm XT2 | XF55-200mm | 55mm | 1/300th Second | f/3.5 | ISO200
This week’s photo of the skyline over at Canary Wharf was taken from the Sky Garden, near London bridge. I took the shot towards the back end of 2020 during a short lockdown interlude, during which, I visited the Sky Garden twice as I wanted to give myself the best chance of walking away with a few good photos. Thankfully I did and you can see another picture taken from the same vantage point looking across West London here: Weekly Photo #79 - Cloudburst Over London.
It’s been years since I’ve looked across to the Isle of Dogs and it not be completely overwhelmed by a ridiculous number of cranes across the skyline. Surely, they haven’t finished building it, have they? Of course, I’m joking. London is and will be under constant change and although there are a few cranes dotted around this photo, it’s still quite a rare sight to see this view with so little construction and if you ask me, it looks fantastic.
Taken through the window, I needed to open up the aperture to hide the dirty glass and by using a cheap lens hood from eBay, I was able to block out any reflections from creeping into the image. A welcome side effect of having a wider aperture is that it lets more light into the camera, so my shutter speed was 1/300th second which, at 55mm, was fast enough to handhold without the fear of getting any camera blur.
Back in post, I decided on a slightly cooler tone and went about dodging and burning parts of the image to help balance the way the light hit the scene. Also, shooting through the dirty glass window did soften the photo a little so I spent some time working with local adjustments to add some of that clarity back to certain parts of the image using various tools such as texture, clarity and contrast sliders, at the same time, being subtle enough to ensure I didn’t overdo it and add any noise or degrade the image in any way. My last step was to push the photo over to Photoshop and use the High Pass filter to sharpen the final image.
This photo has a layered look from front to back which I really like and although it’s an epic cityscape vista with huge skyscrapers that stretch up beyond the horizon, the balance and mood of the photo portrays a strange but very welcome sense of calm when I look at this photo. I’m looking forward to printing this one.
I feel the change of approach needed to photograph subjects such as the natural woodland has already had a positive effect on the way I photograph London. It’s early days as I’ve only photographed the city a handful of times in the last 6 months so I haven’t had a chance to explore this train of thought yet, but based on the photos I’ve taken from my most recent visits, I feel I’m less dependent on the grand vista with epic light and I’m now finding more photos in less favourable conditions which I may have previously struggled with. I’ll probably talk about this again when I’ve had a chance to explore this further and trips to the big smoke start up again for me.
Stay safe out there.
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.