365 Project: Photo 281

Mirror Image.

365 Project: Photo 184

I went for a walk along the South Bank tonight, and very pleasant it was too. The theme was Contrast. It doesn't get much more contrasty than a silhouette.

365 Project: Photo 061

The theme today was whimsical but I wasn't feeling very inspired by this, plus, I was on a London Photo Walk from Tower Bridge to Westminster and so I was always going to use one of my netter photos from that for today. The idea behind this walk was to do some night photography and so we met an hour or so before sunset, the best one we'd had in a couple of weeks, and made our way along the river. This shot is a 30 second exposure of St. Paul's cathedral from the South Bank. I had a boat move through the shot and it left a nice little light trail along the river which I'm quite fond of. I also like the way the water has smoothed itself out and the buoy is all blurred from bobbing about whilst the background remains crisp.

Winter Wonderland

Hey y'all! Hope you all had a great Christmas and are looking forward to the New Year. We've been eating left overs all day yet seem to have more in the fridge now than when we started. Between work and the festivities it's been a while since I posted anything up here so I thought I'd better sort that out.

Last week I met up with some family and, amongst other things, we went to the Winter Wonderland on the corner of Hyde Park. It's basically a big fair ground with an ice rink, loads of places to eat and Zippos' Circus (which was awesome). All of these things were festooned with bright lights, often rapidly moving, and this provided a good opportunity to mess around with long shutter speeds. The pictures above and below had exposures of about half a second. As they were taken hand held and very much on the fly they are pretty blurry; however, the effect of the lights on the rides streaking brightly through the frame more than make up for the technical shortcomings of the shot, I think.

The next two shots were even more ad hoc. A bunch of us went on the Fun House which, asides from being a lot of fun, was actually quite perilous for my camera; all the moving walls and bits of floor led to it taking a few knocks. Still, I got these interesting looking photos out of it. There was a curtain of lit plastic tubes that you had to walk through and I just fired off a few frames as I went through. I wasn't even aiming so I can't take any real credit but I do really like the way they turned out. They're both quite abstract and the second one makes good use of negative, dark space which contrasts nicely with the brightly lit tube. The first one brings to mind those weird bio-luminescent creatures that are found in the depths of the sea; the tentacles of a carnivorous jellyfish maybe.

If I can get back to another fairground when I have time to use a tripod then I think there's real potential here for some imaginative work.

In the coming weeks I'll be finishing off a last few posts on my trip to Vietnam last year and I'll also come up with a post on using textures in photos. This is a post processing technique that blends images together to create a antiqued feel to your pictures. More next week!