Home time in London

Working in central London, I'm lucky to have iconic landmarks all around me.
Working in central London, it's easy to forget those things are there as they become the repetitive backdrop to the daily commute.

On the days I don't just hop straight on the first train from Cannon Street—when I take camera in hand and go for a walk on the way home—there's so much for me to point my camera at and capture: commuters head-down, trying to get home; the lights of the city standing out against the darkening sky; the river, where the views always manage to remind me just how special a city I get to live and work in.

These walks after work generally mean dealing with very low light conditions any time of year other than the height of summer, so certain subjects and styles will be closed to me while others open up.

Capturing London at night

That said, the photo at the top of this article is a panorama stitched together from a series of hand-held shots taken with my Fujifilm X-T2. The low-light ability of that camera means that hand-holding a series of shots to build a panorama is actually possible even at dusk and with respectable results.

It's a rare day I'd feel like setting up a tripod on a busy bridge full of commuters after 8 hours in the office (and rarer still I'd happen to have one with me in town), so fast glass and good high-ISO performance really helps. The frames that make up the panorama are all at ISO 800 and f/1.4, taken using the Fuji 35mm 1.4 lens.

The second image, with the cruise boat, is a crop of a single frame. That extra resolution of the 24mp X-T2 compared to the 16mp X-T1 has brought me back the confidence I used to have years ago with the Canon 5D Mark II, to be able to crop in on a point of interest later and still have a very usable resolution.

Hand-held

Speaking of hand-held panorama shooting, I do quite a lot of it. My style of photography is still quite run-and-gun, even when I'm out on a hike and I'll tend towards shooting a series of shots to stitch together hand-held rather than stopping, setting up the tripod and doing it 'properly'. I do want to try slowing down when I find the better compositions as I'd most certainly get sharper pictures by using the tripod.

Watching the inspirational Youtube videos of people like Thomas Heaton and Ben Horne really gets me excited to go on proper landscape photography missions but, realistically with a 7-month-old, my opportunities for such efforts are heavily limited these days and so when I do get out, as in California in January, I tend to revert to shooting as much as I can rather than taking my time.

One to work on…