T he aim for today was to go and get some photos of Tower Bridge. You can’t have a photo collage of London without including this landmark, it would just be criminal. I thought it would be quite a good idea to photograph the bridge from as many angles as possible to work out which one looked best. Obviously depending on which way you are looking at the bridge, you get a completely different background and I didn’t know London well enough to be able to work out the best viewing spot. Street view on Google was helpful up to a point, but it’s not the same as being there in person.
I started on the North West side of the bridge which wasn’t really working for me. There were a few clouds around, so the whole photo was just really dark and uninteresting. As I got closer to the bridge, I managed to get a few better shots using the trees to frame the shot a bit better and by getting as close as possible to the blue metal work on the bridge, using that to add in a bit of depth of field.
As I moved over to the North East
side of the bridge, I stumbled across
St Katharine Docks, another London
gem I didn’t even know existed.
It was such a cool place. It was out of the wind so the water was nice and calm, and the sun was out which is always nice. You could almost forget you’re in such a massive city when you go into this place. A calm spot hidden amongst the chaos.
After a wander around the docks, I headed across the bridge to get some shots from the other side. I got a couple when I was on the bridge itself, but, as with previous shots I’ve been on, the sun was out and so were the people which wasn’t ideal.
The South East side of the bridge (somewhere just off Shad Thames Street) proved to be the best place to get the photos I wanted. The clouds were only covering half of the frame so there was plenty of light, and from this angle I could get the Gherkin and the Walkie Talkie building in the background which I really liked.
After heading to the South West side of the bridge, I wandered past city hall up More London Place. I had been for an interview here earlier last year, but I hadn’t really noticed the buildings. They were quite unique and interesting in their design, almost brutal in some ways. Sharp and aggressive against the sky.
That street also provided another really cool view of the bridge, using the buildings and the water feature running down the street to frame the shot and again add some interesting lines.
I kept on heading West from there until I got to the Millennium Bridge. This was somewhere I really wanted to photograph, but I needed the bridge to be empty to get the effect I wanted. Clearly that opportunity wasn’t going to present itself today! I fear that may be a sunrise job. I still got a couple of shots of St Paul’s Cathedral while I was there, just because there was still some clouds around making an interesting sky.
On my way to get the train back from Blackfriars station, I was treated to a spectacular sunset over the city. It was a perfect way to end the day.
