Thread: St Paul's

Just back from a few days in Munich and London. I didn't have much opportunity to take pics since I was with non-photographers but I did manage a few quick shots along the way.

Here are two of St Pauls Cathedral seen from the Tate Modern taken a few hours apart.

LX3 ISO250 f3.2 1/100 12.1mm

LX3 ISO800 f2.8 1/8 12.8mm

Very, very nice Olli. You must have had steady hands for the second shot. I have an LX3 and have never managed to get such great images from it!

Thanks. There's are two balconies at the espresso bar on the fourth floor of Tate Modern. I rested the camera on a balcony railing. It was too windy to hand hold any other way.

Oh, interesting! I'm going to a dinner on the 28th floor on the Park Lane Hilton in December and was hoping to be able to get some decent pics using my Leica X1. Might have to bring a back up though. The LX3 lens is slightly faster or I might take the NEX5 as the high iso is so good :) Anyhow, if I get anything half as good as yours I'll be very surprised!

olli, it's wonderful that you took both of these - very smart! What a difference a few hours makes. In your daytime shot, that pedestrian bridge really pulls my eye in..whereas obviously it's almost not there in your night shot. Love that evening photo, olli! It's a real beauty. Not that I don't like the daytime one - I do, especially the gold tops on the two towers back on the left and that one way in the back farther on the left, along with the lights in the buildings and on the boats, too. Great sky in that day time one, too.

I'm glad you're back from your trip. I've missed your photos here.

I'm not sure I managed to straighten this properly. Many pictures of buildings on my Spanish trip gave me a hard time deciding how best to get the right balance in the straightening department!

LR3 has a very handy set of grids which are great for these kinds of shots. If that doesn't work my normal approach is to fiddle with until I can't tell which way is up anymore then give up and claim it as an aesthetic judgement.

It's a beautiful row of buildings - colour, design, scale.

Perhaps you might consider cropping a little from the top and the right to get rid of the worst of the electrical cables and the 'heaviness' of the tree?

You can also get a three-way level cube and avoid the problem from the outset.

Christina, I know how you feel about getting things "straight"...and it's even harder with a wide angle and an old building. Your photograph is very nicely done - I feel the same as olli about the scene and feel that the light and color a beautiful! Which camera, if I may ask - the X1? If you wouldn't mind adding that in, it would be great.

LR3 is good with the grids, I agree and I, too, will use

an aesthetic judgement

as a good fallback, and sometimes even on purpose.

Deirdre - that cube is, if I may say, really reminiscent of the 70s!

Tried again in LR3 using the little spirit level. I can have straight buildings or a straight lamp post but not both it seems! Added a bit of fill light and cropping was a good suggestion, thanks Olli. Deirdre, if I had "the cube" I wouldn't be able to use my VF but it's an excellent idea