The weather and London’s transport system were both against me. I’d finished photographing the protests against outsourcing and had made my way to eat lunch. I wanted something fast and cheap, and my favourite central London Wetherspoons was ideal, and as I ate I checked my travel plans to find the Docklands Light Railway had shut down somewhere between where I was and King George V, where I’d planned to start taking some urban landscape panoramas.
Probably I should have abandoned my plans, but I pressed ahead, taking an alternative route to Woolwich Arsenal via London Bridge, thinking if need be I could walk across in the tunnel under the river. By the time I got there, the DLR at least at that end was up and running again, but it still meant I started over half an hour later than I had hoped.
It was a bright sunny day, blue sky with not a cloud in sight, and very pleasant for the time of year, but this is possibly about the worst weather possible for making good panoramic photographs. When you have an angle of view og over one and a half right angles, most images are likely to include large areas of sky. It tends to kill pictures if this is either featureless overcast or even worse simply blue. You want detail, nice clouds in a blue or grey sky. And blue sky is the worst of all, because although we generally see it as a uniform blue, as your view gets closer to the sun it gets a lot brighter, and much lighter in the picture.
I’d arranged to meet with some friends who were carrying out a protest in the early evening, and had to be back there for 5.30 pm, so my time was strictly limited. In the end I did less than half the walk I’d intended, and the second half was really the part which held the more interest for me, with the possibility of a little harmless trespass.
At some point I glanced at my watch and had to rush back to King George V for my journey back into central London. I promised myself I would come back soon and complete the walk, but three months later I’ve yet to do so, and in areas such as this things may well have changed significantly.
Some of the pictures, despite the light are not bad, but others were more just a note to myself that I need to return at a better time. As usual when making these panoramic images I work with a standard 3:2 format, intending to later crop them to around 16×9. Not everything works in panoramic format and I also took a number of pictures with a longer lens.
More pictures at North Woolwich.
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Tags: blue sky, north Woolwich, panoramas, panoramic, River Thames, Royal Docks