Southbank Panoramas

I’d met a friend at the Festival Hall (RFH) to talk about an art project we have been planning together, and as we left I walked up to Waterloo Bridge with her I saw the wide expanse of sky and clouds with the sun just sinking, and knew it was just about time to take some of the panoramas that I had been talking with her about making around the cultural buildings in this area.  I had an hour or more to kill before a lecture I wanted to hear a mile or two away, which was just about the right amount of time.

So I made my goodbyes and started by taking a view from the top of the bridge, though this wasn’t really what I had in mind. But it did look as if it would make a good picture and was hard to resist.  Then I wandered back towards the RFH as I’d had an idea as we walked past earlier, but things had changed a little and the picture I’d thought about wasn’t quite there. But there was another obvious subject, with the sculpture, the yellow stairway, the RFH amd in the distance the London Eye.

But the scenes I was rather more interested in were those that included both interior and exterior views, such as this:

© 2011, Peter Marshall

Like the others it was taken using manual exposure and focus using a Nikon 20mm f2.8 on the D700. Some of the images were taken with the camera in portrait mode, others landscape, and between 2 and 5 exposures were combined to give the final panorama using PTGui.  I like to keep things simple, and worked without a tripod, pivoting the camera on a finger placed roughly where I think the rear nodal point should be. It usually works quite well.

You can see a larger version of this image and a few others on My London Diary, ending with a wide-angle view of the Barbican Arts Centre a mile or so away at night, taken a little later in the evening when I had a few minutes to spare before that lecture.

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