Every so often a photo needs a very lengthy explanation because it means more than what you see or the story is more interesting than the average photo. The first photo is a cap tip to an amazing photographer called Matthew Browne who has a brilliant book on London (and Wales come to think of it). I have shamelessly copied this photo but I give him full credit for the composition and inspiration.

Using Apple Maps 3D rendering I could twist the aspect to see where the buildings interact similarly to the photo I was trying to copy.

I saw the photo in the book and used a variety of 3D modelling, Google maps street view etc. to be able to work out the location. It is East India DLR station by the way. I would have tried to be a bit more original with the composition but really there are very few options. I brought a super-clamp to fix to a railing.

My wife and I just came back from London and I screwed up, I had been catching Underground Trains on the Jubilee line all trip at 5:15 and assumed all of the tube lines would run at that time. They don’t! We moved hotels and I got to Kings Cross at 5:10 only to find deserted tunnels and the trains didn’t start until 6, we were leaving that morning and I would miss the dark anyway and light trails are fundamentally flawed in the daylight! So I had to bail out, I did get some interesting photos of empty Kings Cross and a cool one of Buck House.

Anyway, a tragic turn of events occurred and I had to go and support my best pal at a funeral. In an attempt to avoid feeling like he needed to be a good host when he had plenty more on his mind than dealing with my tedious nonsense I said there was a photo I needed to take to get out of his hair.

My first mistake. I was staying in a village called Kings Langley (near Watford) which is a 30 minute train ride to Euston, I looked at the journey to the station from my hotel - a very swish Premier Inn, and no Lenny Henry didn’t tuck me in, he was too busy talking nonsense about slavery reparations - was 4 minutes. Turns out it was 4 minutes by car and I was walking - it was a 25 minute walk up a fairly steep hill!. An hour later I got to Euston and then it was half an hour to East India, I got there and it was really busy, still a bit too bright and there were a couple of guards so I pivoted! A few stops down the line was Cyprus. A stop I had toyed with for ages, it is a 15 minute walk from there to a bridge over the Thames that looks straight back at the runway of London City Airport While Matthew Browne also has a couple of photos from this point he isn’t getting the credit here - it is a quite well known spot that I have wanted to go to for a long while.

It is however a ‘goldilocks’ spot. In daylight it is boring, in nighttime it is too dark to pick out details. There was no point going too early in the morning because planes only start flying at 6AM so summer isn’t great. Weather obviously has to be right too because you need really clean skies because you are photographing about 2 miles of city and trying to compress it. Those are the factors that you need to get right before you even arrive.

Once you get there, you also have to take into account every car and bus shake the bridge so long exposures are a nightmare but you need a long exposure because you want the darkness, you are at the mercy of the airport timetable, you don’t know if things are about to take off or land and then there are weird factors you don’t think about until you are there, I had about 3 seconds between the plane hitting its marks on the runway, stopping and firing up its engines, as soon as the engines have been running for more than a couple of seconds the heat haze blurs pretty much the whole image.

To cut an extremely long and tedious story short, I got really lucky! It even turned out the BA text wasn’t blocked by the wing.

Then on the way back I jumped off the DLR at East India and ripped of Matthew Browne’s photo. Which also wasn’t without its difficulties. Very limited places to be, I had to lean over a barrier to attach my camera which was probably naughty, not many trains we running because it was night time etc. But the biggest problem is that in order to get the light trail from the train, you need it to come into the station and when it does so it makes the whole station shake because it is essentially on stilts. Anyway, again I got fairly lucky, it would be nice to have had a bit more blue in the sky but all things considered I like the image.

I am always a bit funny about my photos, I see every flaw in them and being hyper-critical is a driver of continued improvement and I imagine if I was to put these two images into a competition they would probably not score especially well. To be honest, I couldn’t give a damn, I wanted to make something nice out of an enormously shitty trip and I think I did so these are for Rich, the best bloke in the world.

Sometimes it just works out

London Trip