Blending Light in London | Weekly Photo #70
I cannot wait to get back up to St Paul’s Cathedral with my camera again. I love the 360-degree views of the city it provides and no matter how often I go up there, the different times of the year and the changing light conditions mean that there is always a fresh shot to be taken.
Fujifilm X-T30 | XF10-24mm | 10mm | 1.7 Seconds | f/6.4 | ISO160
I’ve talked about photographing from St Paul’s Cathedral in a couple of previous posts here:
For this photo, choosing a focal length was easy. I wanted to take it as wide as possible to capture the top of the roof and Western Towers so I used my XF10-24mm wide-angle lens on my Fujifilm X-T30 camera. No tripods are allowed at St Paul’s cathedral so I discreetly used a small table-top tripod I carry in my lightweight kit and rested it between the pillars that surround the Stone Circle to ensure the photo was sharp in these low light conditions.
What I particularly like about this photo is how a potential ordinary, monochromatic photo of the city is brought to life by taking it at just the right time to ensure there is enough ambient light to capture lots of detail in the buildings and sky but late enough for the city lights to add areas of interest and separation into the scene. Some situations will require a technique sometimes called time blending to get an effect like this. You take two photos of the exact same composition but at different times. The first photo to capture a brighter scene with lots of details and the second when it gets darker and the city lights are turned on. The two photos are then later blended in post-production so it shows the lighter scene with the city lights, like the photo here.
Thankfully, I was able to capture all the detail I needed in a single frame and later in post-processing, I focused on emphasising the brighter orange lights and desaturating the strong blue tones across the entire photo, all using the HSL sliders in Adobe Lightroom. There is one thing that bugs me though and that’s the big spotlight near the centre of the image. It’s too dominant and distracts somewhat. I tried toning it down a little but otherwise, I’ll have to accept it as part of the scene I was shooting.
I’m looking forward to getting back up to capture London’s rooftops and have already booked to re-visit the Sky Garden viewing platform next week. Fingers crossed I get a keeper and if so, I’ll be sure to share it here soon enough.
Cheers
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.