London “Full Stop” | Weekly Photo #98
Along with working through a bit of a backlog of photo editing and submitting a batch of images to this year’s Landscape Photographer of the Year competition, I’ve been spending a lot of time down on the south coast over the last couple of weeks while I continue to wait for conditions to improve enough to entice me back into the woodland. I’ve been back once or twice to keep an eye on things and see how the spring colours are taking shape but in between, I’ve been photographing the white cliffs and rolling hills along the South Downs and look forward to sharing some of the photos I took in the coming weeks.
I’m also getting ready to get back to the city on a regular basis. I miss the familiarity of London, the people, the energy, those epic cityscapes, and although I’m not yet scraping the barrel to post London cityscape photos here on my blog, if I don’t venture into the city soon, I fear it won’t be too long until I am.
Fujifilm X-T30 | XF10-24mm | 10mm | 1/9th Second | f/11 | ISO160
Back in February 2020, I went for a sunrise shoot around More London along the Thames and although there was plenty of cloud about, the sky was pretty clear to the east so there was plenty of pre-sunrise light shining through, creating these awesome magenta tones throughout the scene.
Starting off on the upper level, I took a few photos of City Hall and Tower Bridge using The Scoop as some foreground interest (also featured in this previous photo) and shortly after, made my way down to the lower level to seek out another photo before heading west along the Thames.
Dotted around More London Estate are 5 of these reflective black sculptures made by a British artist called Fiona Banner. Installed nearly 20 years ago, these glistening spheres of various shapes are large three-dimensional representations of a full stop from 5 commonly used typefaces. It’s an interesting idea that explores the notion of language and text and it’s only when I looked into the story behind the installation and how the project has now cleverly evolved to bring attention to key environmental issues, I started to appreciate them as more than just shiny black shapes and wanted to include them as a compositional feature in one of my photos.
After spending just a few minutes in search of a composition, I found this one here featuring City Hall and Tower Bridge with one of the “Full Stop” art sculptures conveniently leaning into the frame, providing some useful visual weight on the left-hand side. Standing there, the composition was ok and I knew there was an image to be had, but something was off. There was no foreground to speak of and the subjects were a bit lost in the image. The sculpture appeared too small and inconspicuous while Tower Bridge had too much visual clutter in the background created by the buildings on the far side of the river.
The solution was quite simple, I needed to crouch right down and get the camera as close to the ground as I could. By doing so, I was able to emphasise those fantastic lines in the foreground and use them to lead the viewer’s eye from the bottom of the image, up to the very centre of Tower Bridge. The low viewpoint also made the full stop sculpture more dominant in the scene and along with Tower Bridge and City Hall, they all appeared more isolated, standing out against the bright pre-sunrise sky which is the exact look I was trying to achieve.
The biggest challenge I had once the composition was locked in was the dynamic range. With the dark areas in the foreground and bright dawn light, it made balancing the exposure particularly difficult as I didn’t want to clip the highlights and over expose the sky but at the same time, exposing for the sky meant my shadows were just too dark in places and recovering them would be difficult and at best introduce lots of digital noise and mess in those areas. The solution was to bracket the exposures and blend the correctly exposed parts of the image together in post-production. I used to bracket my images as a matter of course but these days with sensors being so good, I tend to only do it if I feel it’s the only way to get the shot I’m looking to take and this was certainly one of those times.
With my settings dialled in and focus set to give me (almost) front to back sharpness, down went the shutter and although reasonably confident I had a shot in the bag, this was one of those times I would have to wait to get the RAW files back on my computer and merge the exposures before I knew for certain.
Have a great 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.