City of Gold | Weekly Photo #23
I enjoy taking photos from this rooftop location along London’s Fenchurch Street. It’s called the Garden at 120 which opened at the beginning of 2019 and it is free to visit with no booking needed. As you can see here, it’s in a great position to capture an epic sunset across West London which I was fortunate to photograph a few months ago on a nice, warm summers evening in the city.
Fujifilm XT2 | XF18-55mm | 30mm | 1/120th Second | f/3.6 | ISO200
Like most rooftop locations in London, one thing you will have to contend with is shooting through the glass. Being relatively new, the glass isn’t too dirty yet but to get the best, cleanest photos possible there are a couple of things you can do to eliminate the dirt and reflections when photographing through glass.
I briefly touched on the subject of shooting through glass windows on a previous weekly photo post when I took an early morning shot of Canary Wharf from the Sky Garden which you can read here: Weekly Photo 13 | London In The Mist but simply put, if you do the following 2 things, it will help you get the best results:
Use a wide aperture. f/4 or below should do the trick but the lower the better. This will render the closest subjects to the camera out of focus and ensure the final image is clean of the grime from the window.
Use a lens hood. You can pick these up for under £10 on eBay and they fit around the end of your lens. When pressed up against the glass they cut out the light from around the camera which will remove reflections from the final shot.
I used both of the above techniques when I took the photo above and one of the more refreshing things about shooting up on this terrace is that they allow tripods. As long as you keep out of the way, they really don’t mind so even when the light drops, you can still capture some nice sharp photos of the city.
For post-processing, I started in Lightroom. I brought down the highlights and brought up the shadows. I added some split toning to emphasise the golds and blues in the shadows and then took it into Photoshop to sharpen and remove a few distractions on the horizon.
I’m really pleased how this came out, particularly as the dynamic range was really high but the trusty Fujifilm dealt with it and all the detail in the shadows was there to recover.
Speak to you soon.
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.