A Modern Classic City | Weekly Photo #94
I’ve been a bit busy this week as I decided to start a small printing project. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you may already know how strongly I feel about getting photos off the hard drive and on to paper and taking it one step further, how much I love a good photobook. I’ve brought a few photography books over the last year, written by some of my favourite landscape photographers and like nothing more than finding a quiet spot and reading the stories, admiring the photos, and drawing inspiration from their work. If you’re still on the fence about the benefits of printing, check out this post I wrote called Why Every Photographer Should Print Their Photos.
I decided to embark on a small personal project to design and print my own book. I could have gone down the easier route and uploaded the photos and use the software on offer from the print lab but where’s the fun in that? By using some of my photos and stories I’ve written on my blog, I’ve decided to download a copy of Adobe’s InDesign, learn how to navigate the application and design my own book from scratch. I’ll design the layout, the cover, type and prepare around 70 images ready to send to the lab to produce the final book.
It will take some time to complete, but at the end of the process, I hope to be holding the finished book in my hand as a bit of a keepsake and as a bonus, have learned a new skill by using InDesign to build the book from scratch. It’s still early days but I’ll keep you posted on how I get on.
Fujifilm XT2 | XF18-55mm | 25mm | 13 Seconds | f/13 | ISO200
I took this photo while out in London with my camera back in September 2020. It was a wet, cloudy day and I had spent much of the afternoon photographing the city in the pouring rain, using the wet surfaces and puddles to find interesting compositions of London. It’s on this day I took one of my favourite photos of 2020 called Rainy City.
As it started to get dark, I ventured over to my intended viewpoint just along the river from St Katherine Docks in East London. I found a spot on the north bank of the river which provides a fantastic view of the classic architecture of Tower Bridge with The Shard behind it, which is itself, fast becoming a modern classic. Even though The Shard is considerably taller than Tower Bridge, it’s position, set back from the bridge, adds some much-needed visual weight to the left-hand side of the scene, helping to balance the composition.
With the water taking up much of the bottom half of the photo, I wanted to fill the empty space with the bright reflections from the city lights, but with the ripples in the water, it looked far too busy for my taste. To remove the ripples, I closed the camera’s aperture down to f/13, which in turn, increased the shutter speed to 13 seconds, resulting in a longer exposure, smoothing out the water, giving the final photo a more calm, relaxing look about it.
Once I had the RAW files loaded into Lightroom, I started off with the usual contrast and colour adjustments. I then cooled the temperature down to help with the orange cast created by the city lights and using some local adjustments, dodged and burned parts of the image to help emphasise the lights and darken the pier to the right, making it less distracting. I’m quite happy with how the final photo has turned out.
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.