Bridge to St. Paul's

Ahhh Boxing Day (is it called that anywhere other than the UK?), judging by my friends on Facebook, it should be renamed recovery day. Since I barely drink at all these days, I feel pretty good, it's only a pre-christmas stomach bug that's letting me down a bit. For those who are feeling a bit worse for wear, I hope you had a great time, and that you feel better soon! In general, I hope everyone has had a fantastic Christmas.

As well as Boxing day, it's Thursday, which means I owe you a blog post. Yes it's a little later than usual, I have had a bit of a day on the sofa myself, as we don't get many days like that anymore!

The picture you see was one taken a couple of years ago, when my main camera was a Nikon D90. Sometimes I go back into my photographic archives for inspiration, and come across a photo I want to work on. I often then question why I did nothing about it at the time, but realise that it doesn't really matter. As we grow at our said artistic ability, our inspirations and motivations will always change and develop.

I looked at this picture and knew I wanted to create a black & white image out of it. Although I have black & white photo processing software applications, I nearly always create the black & white image in Lightroom, as I find this does everything I need it to do. The only other feature I thought about adding was a dollop of 'grain' to give a real old photo look, but I preferred the cleaner, modern look. The only other program I used other than Lightroom and Photoshop, was Topaz Adjust, to bring a bit more detail out of the buildings.

This photo has a couple of obvious leading lines towards the magnificent St. Paul's Cathedral, and I have seen other photos from the same perspective, but I was happy to capture the hustle and bustle of the bridge as well.

Until Saturday then (my next blog post), keep having a great Christmas!

St. Paul's Revisited

I have posted this picture on my previous blog and Flickr before but unlike my 'Holy Murano' picture a little while ago, this isn't just a 'make a couple of tweaks here' job, this is a fully redeveloped, remastered picture. As I said, I first 'published' (in the internet sense) it sometime last year and it got quite a good reception but truthfully I was never satisfied with it myself. There was too much noise and distortion in the sky and it was always my plan to start again with it after that.

So this is my new version. It's much more subtle than the last attempt and less extreme on the saturation as well. I am indeed much happier with it and this is the version I will use from here forward. It is of course the spectacular St. Paul's Cathedral plus Millennium Bridge. It was taken late one summers afternoon in London last year, while I had some time to spend after a training course. I created this iteration by using just 2 bracketed shots for the HDR and I think this helped reduce all the problems I had before with it.