Tower Bridge by night

I’ve been in London, a city I really like, more than a few times, but I’ve never gone totally mad with a camera when I’ve been there (though I have taken the odd photo).  I often visited to attend the Stuff Live gadget show, and on one of those occasions three years ago, with time to kill before my flight home, I wandered down to the banks of the River Thames with my Nikon D50.  The photograph I took that night is one that reignited my interest in photography.

My knowledge of photography back then was limited, but I knew a few basics.  I understood the relationship between aperture and shutter speed, and knew that a wider aperture required a shorter shutter speed, and that a narrower aperture meant more of the shot in focus.   I didn’t have much of an idea of what the actual numbers meant though, but in terms of ISO I knew the idea was to keep it as low as possible.

Armed with those basics, I stood on the bank of the Thames and put my camera in Shutter Priority mode, as I reckoned I needed to control the shutter speed to keep the shot sharp, and would just rely on the LCD screen to see if enough of the shot was in focus, rather than pick a magic f-stop out of the air.

I decided with the help of a bin I could probably keep the camera steady for one second, but not much more, so that was what I selected for my shutter speed.  Once I half-pressed the shutter release to meter the scene, the camera came back with lots of flashing numbers, telling me that the scene would be underexposed even at the widest aperture the lens could achieve.

Not wanting to slow down the shutter even further, and not able to do anything with aperture (and not being happy having it so wide as I feared how little of the shot would be in focus), I decided to increase the ISO from 200 to 400, hoping that this would help, and of course it did.

Now the camera was happy to shoot with an aperture of f/4.5.  I took the shot, and looked at the LCD.  The shot was overexposed – I could tell this by seeing that areas of the bridge were blown out, and the black sky wasn’t black.

I realised that I needed to give the camera a little more information for it to meter accurately – I was using centre-weighted metering which took into account the whole scene, and all that black of the sky was confusing the camera, which was trying to make it lighter.  I wanted it to be black, so I switched to spot metering, and chose a part of the brickwork on the bridge to meter against.  This time the aperture came back as f/9.5, I held the camera steady, released the shutter, and saw exactly what I wanted to see on the back of the LCD.

A nice bonus in the scene was the presence of a full moon, which I was able to include in the frame during composition.

For a long time I was happy with the image straight from the camera, and it was only later when I became more familiar with post-processing that was able to realise the full potential from this shot and the image you see here has gone through my usual post processing steps in Aperture.

To this day it is still a photograph that I really like – and all the more so because it was a result of me beginning to understand the technicalities of photography.