A London Christmas | Weekly Photo #81
As I did last year with this photo of the famous Covent Garden Christmas tree, I wanted to share another festive themed photo so I re-edited this one I took last year along New Bond Street in Mayfair of the classy Cartier building wrapped in a bow.
Fujifilm X-T30 | XF10-24mm | 10mm | 1/20th Second | f/4 | ISO800
I had planned to share a photo of London at Christmas featuring some lights or decorations taken this year and I did manage to make a trip into town to shoot around the West End before the restrictions were severly tightened around the city but I’ve not had time to sort through the photos I took so I checked back on the photos I took last year and found this one only partly processed and effectively abandoned.
I’m not sure if this is common amongst all photographers but even through this photo was taken over a year ago, I can somehow remember the morning vividly and seem to be able to recall where and when I took almost every photo in my collection. I remember walking from Green Park Station just as the rain started and wishing I had remembered a hooded jacked or umbrella but as I was on my way to work, I couldn’t just stand there taking photos getting soaking wet so I had to find cover and wait out the heaviest of the rain.
Once the rain had cleared, I walked along New Bond Street and stopped directly opposite the decorated Cartier store so, I grabbed the camera to take the shot. Even with my wide-angle 10-24mm attached to the camera, I knew this would be a tough shot to take as with my back against the wall opposite, I could only just fit everything in and having to point the camera upwards meant I needed space around the building to straighten the verticals in post processing so, I wouldn’t really know if the shot would work until I got it back home and started editing the photo.
If I remember correctly, the reason the photo was never quite finished was I just couldn’t get the lines to look even close to straight using the geometry tools in Lightroom but this time round, I had the guided upright tool at my disposal so I could now tell Lightroom what lines needed to be vertical and which were horizontal and like magic, the picture was straightened but with very little space to spare on this 3:2 crop. The remaining post-processing was cooling down the colour balance, desaturating the strong blues and reds and brightening up the iconic London Phone Box in the foreground.
I’ve spoken before about revisiting older photos as new tools and editing skills develop, you never know what potential you have lurking in your archive so I definitely recommend checking back on partly edited photos (you can filter these in Lightroom) to see what photos you thought had potential but couldn’t quite get right. As time passes, your skills will have developed and the software you use might now have a feature that solved the issue like it did for me.
It’s been a strange old year and one that most people will want to, but probably won’t ever forget so, with all that’s going on in the world, I do hope you can put that to the side just for a short while and enjoy the festivities as best you can.
Merry Christmas.
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.