London's Burning | Weekly Photo #64
After a couple of weeks away, having a much-needed break from adulting, I’m now back and eager to get out again with my camera. I did manage to venture out a couple of times while on holiday but judging by the photos I’ve seen on social media, it looks like I’ve missed some fantastic misty sunrises as a result of the extremely hot and humid weather the UK has experienced recently. I’ll be heading out this week on the hunt for some misty woodland landscapes, so fingers crossed I get some favourable conditions of my own.
Fujifilm X-T30 | XF35mm F2 | 35mm | 1/20th Second | f/10 | ISO160
This is the third and arguably my favourite photo I’ve shared on the Weekly Photoblog that was taken during the same morning back in January this year. I was travelling light with just my Fujifilm X-T30 and a couple of small prime lenses while photographing along the River Thames and More London.
I’ve said it before that, while I normally carry a heavier backpack with a few lenses, filters and a tripod, etc, I will often ditch the weight and take my ultra-lightweight kit into London as it allows me to stay quick and nimble as I search for new, interesting compositions and you can’t get much smaller and lighter than Fujifilm’s F2 prime lenses.
It was a predominantly cloudy morning during this shoot but after capturing a few blue hour shots of Tower Bridge and HMS Belfast (see the links below) I noticed some warmer light peeking through some gaps in the cloud so as my optimism for a great sunrise increased, so did my pace as I headed to London Bridge to take a shot of this classic composition of HMS Belfast and Tower Bridge. The good thing about taking photographs from London Bridge is that it has a rather wide ledge, making it a perfect platform for my small table-top tripod. In theory, I could have opened up the aperture by a few stops to increase the shutter speed enough to hand-hold the camera but as I had the tripod with me, I could keep the aperture slightly smaller at f/10 to maintain a larger depth of field and a slightly sharper image.
It seemed to come out of no-where but all of a sudden, that small area of light I’d seen as I was walking towards the bridge exploded across the sky like a raging fire. I kid you not, I haven’t enhanced the colour, it really did look like this. Luckily, I had already lined up the shot, ensuring the ship and bridge were dead-centre in the frame as no sooner as I had taken a few landscape and portrait photos, the light disappeared behind a cloud and the fire was out, which was my cue to pack up and head to the office. After a successful morning shoot, I couldn’t wait to see how these photos looked back on the computer.
As the sunrise was so epic, the resulting image was very bright with deep oranges and magentas. These days, I tend to like a more desaturated photo so, in Lightroom, I dialled back the saturation to help tame those bold colours. I didn’t want to take too much away as like I said before, the scene really did look like this and I wanted to stay true to the image I captured. Apart from that and along with some of my usual edits, I used the radial filter to selectively brighten the darkest areas of the image as with so much backlight, the foreground was quite dark. Overall, I’m really pleased with the final shot and I said above, it turned out to be my favourite of the shoot.
If you missed the other two posts from this particular morning, you can find them here:
First Light at More London | Weekly Photo 44.
Until next week.
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.