In recent weeks I’ve rather lost my photographic energy, feeling that all too often I’m repeating the sort of image making I’ve made in the past. With a few hours to while away in London before I went to a concert at the Barbican I decided to mix things up a bit, taking just my little Fuji X100VI and a determination to come up with something a little more creative.
I had no real plan as to where I would go, but knew I wanted to use movement in some of my photos. One of my first experiments was from the top deck of a bus, travelling down Regents Street. Raindrops on the window immediately reduced the clarity of the images I shot and I used a slowish shutter speed (about half a second) to add to the impressionistic look. With so little clearly defined in the image, it was important to have something immediately recognisable in the photo to direct the viewer’s eye to, so I was grateful there was a distinctive red London bus on the road just ahead of us.
A rainy day may not be the obvious choice for photography, but one place I knew might work in these conditions was Piccadilly Circus, where the colours from the huge cinema screens reflect in the damp pavements. Once again I used a slow shutter and waited for people to walk into the frame I’d set, arriving at or leaving the tube station entrance.
