I’m at an age where birthdays are less important than the indication that time is passing – way too quickly; but my wife treated me to a photographic expedition with lunch. We travelled to the City of London to the address 20 Fenchurch Street, otherwise known as the Walkie Talkie. She had booked a trip to the Sky Garden, on the 36th floor. This is over 500ft above ground and gave us an excellent view of London, from Canary Wharf to our east, through the Shard and Strata Tower and the Thames to the smarter parts of London to our west, seeing both south and north banks of the Thames, along with many of the bridges.
It was a great place to be with a camera and I had my newly acquired Fujifilm X-T2. Photographically the light was quite difficult: the glass of the building, the sun through the haze and the time of day contrived to make everything appear bluer than was natural. I used Capture One Pro (from Phase One software) to adjust the colour tone so that it’s the sort of scene that I remember. I didn’t adjust an image of 20 Fenchurch Street from street level, except to add one in monochrome:
After a great lunch in the Darwin Brasserie (for which we needed a bank loan), we walked to St Paul’s Cathedral, where some sort of wedding function was under way. I think that this (very young) couple were using the venue for some romantic shots for their album; we saw no guests:
We finally reached the South Bank of the Thames, to meet our son and his family; they posed reasonably willingly:
