Square Mile | Weekly Photo #59
One of my favourite places to take photos of London is from up high amongst the rooftops as I love the unique perspective of the city it can provide. This photo here, taken from St Paul’s Cathedral is probably my favourite of all London’s rooftop views, made even more special by the fact it was taken after sunset during the summer months which is not usually possible and I’ll expand on that a little later.
Like many cities, getting access to rooftop locations can be quite expensive but there are some parts of London that provide rooftop views for free. To help you, I recently wrote a post with My Top 5 Free Rooftop Locations to Photograph London so if you are visiting the city and want to take some rooftop photographs, I recommend checking this post out.
Fujifilm X-T30 | XF18-55mm | 18mm | 1/15th Sec | f/5 | ISO160
For those that don’t know, London is made up of 32 boroughs and 2 cities, one being the City of Westminster and the other being the City of London, also known as the Square Mile (it actually has an area of 1.05 miles but who’s counting?). Located in the Square Mile is St Paul’s Cathedral from where this photo was taken from and London’s first financial district which is the impressive cluster of buildings you can see in the photo.
I also featured this location to shoot from in my previous blog post titled My Top 10 Photography Spots in London
As I alluded to before, the reason this composition of the city during a summer’s sunset is hard to get is that St Paul’s Cathedral usually shuts around 5pm which is way before the best light starts to appear, but during August, the Cathedral opens later on Thursdays, so, if you are lucky enough to be available for just 4 nights each year; you can climb to the top of the Cathedral and capture some fantastic photos of the city.
I took this photo with my small Fujifilm X-T30 and XF18-55mm lens. Whenever I plan a trip to the very top of St Paul’s, experience tells me to pack as light as possible because the Summer Lates can get busy with other photographers and there is very little room up there so I try to avoid a big, bulky backpack and it goes without saying, tripods are a big no-no.
For this shot, the shutter speed was a little slow for handheld, so I rested my camera on the rail with my camera strap around my neck (just in case) and took this shot of the city with the last of the sun’s light reflecting beautifully on the then unfinished 22 Bishopsgate tower.
Unfortunately, St Paul’s will not open later this year due to obvious reasons but when they do, I will be there, in line to capture my favourite view of the city.
Until next time.
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.