After the landscape and abstract images in my last uploads, now for something completely different: Recently we were in London for a few days and of course wanted to take some of the classic shots, like this passageway under Westminster Bridge. However, when we went down to the Thames on our first evening, this passageway was occupied by so many people taking selfies that we decided to take long exposures of Big Ben and the Thames and return to this composition on one of the following days (or rather mornings to avoid the crowds).
When we went there for the second time, there were no people, but I wasn't really thrilled with the composition as I felt like something was missing. Nevertheless, I decided to take a few pictures, but with the arch so close and Big Ben so far away, I had to stop down the aperture quite a bit, which resulted in a pretty long shutter speed. As I wasn't really excited by this composition, I didn't set up my tripod and only took a few pictures handheld with the hope that at least one of them would be sharp. However, as it turned out that evening when I scrolled through my images, many of these images were not sharp which made me regret my decision to not use a tripod. But nothing was lost yet, as we still had 2 days to go.
On the next day, we again walked past Westminster Bridge and I decided to quickly take an image with the camera on my tripod, such that I have at least one tack sharp image. However, when we walked down to the passageway, another photographer had already set up his tripod right where I wanted to shoot. Luckily, he didn’t mind me standing in front of him and taking a few images. However, as soon as I was set up, I heard footsteps of someone approaching, quickly pressed the shutter and as luck would have it, that guy ended up in my image. On my second attempt, I pressed the shutter and again a man, this time with his dog, came around the corner and also ended up in my image. On my last attempt, I finally managed to take an image without anyone in it, but back at the computer I have to say that having a person in the frame was exactly the missing piece of the puzzle. Moreover, the longer exposure due to the stopping down blurs the man and his dog, which gives a really nice sense of movement. Since I didn’t want to annoy the other photographer too much, I felt a bit pressured to get out of the way and forgot to manually set the lowest ISO, so the camera used the maximum value I had chosen for Auto ISO, which was probably good as the man and his dog would have been too blurred otherwise. All in all, I really like this image as it combines one of the classic London images with something I haven’t seen so far. I hope you like it too!
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