True story…. long before the London Eye was built and brought all the huge crowds to the South Bank of the Thames, I was doing night photography, taking pictures of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. There was one other person nearby, a Japanese tourist also taking pictures of Big Ben. When he finished taking pictures, he asked me if I knew what time it was. I looked at my watch and told him, and he walked away. It took a minute till I realized we’d both been taking pictures of the most famous clock in the world, and still didn’t know what time it was. Duh.
What? The Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, the seat of British government, built in Victorian London from 1840-70.
How? You can never count on the weather, specially in the British Isles. On the day I made this picture, it was getting late and the sun had all but disappeared behind some clouds (it was after 8pm). The light had gone and everything had turned bland. But I had been hoping to get a good panorama of the Houses of Parliament, and knew that I’d be forced to work my magic on the computer later. Not my preferred method; more my last resort.
I won’t go into all the intricacies involved with turning a bland image into a ‘work of art’, but suffice it to say that I probably spent several hours to create this image, including lots of color saturation, creating a false reflection in the water and adding a lot of warmth to the image.
Later, this a print of this image hung on the British Consulate in Chicago for several weeks.
Settings? Digital SLR, 24-105mm lens at 70mm, ISO 100, 1/125 sec at f/4.5, RAW capture, no tripod. This image is a stitched panorama from six different raw images.
And here’s the unedited/ unretouched panorama I had to work from:
Michael Hudson Fine Art Photography 