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.
After lunch I took a stroll down towards Green Park and found this K6 telephone in the middle of the pavement, not far from the Royal Academy. I decided to use it as the focus for an in camera multiple exposure, with each frame taken from a slightly different position. I tried to keep the phone box in the same sort of place in each frame, waiting between photos for people to walk through carrying umbrellas. Composing an image like this in camera (rather than combining multiple frames together later in Photoshop) is rather unpredictable, but at least you can see how the image is building up as you add each layer. The end result is a little bewildering, but i think it captures a sense of what I was after and it’s definitely a technique I’ll try again sometime.
I eventually arrived at Hyde Park Corner and decided to continue my walk through Hyde Park rather than along the busy Park Lane. Despite the rain there were plenty of cyclists and runners about, so I used this as an opportunity to try my hand at some slow speed panning shots, using a shutter speed of 1/15 and 1/30 of a second. Inevitably I ended up with lots of failures, but even though these two photos have almost nothing sharply in focus, I like their sense of speed and you can still clearly understand what they’re about.
Eventually I emerged onto Park Lane where I wanted to use the same sort of technique on a passing London bus. Quite a few passed by, moving at a reasonable speed, so I had lots of practice. Just as I was about to move on an old Routemaster appeared on the horizon (the sort of bus I used to catch to college in London in the early 1990s so I’m very fond of them) so I had one last go and was delighted when one of my photos had just the right combination of sharpness and blur - the icing on a very enjoyable day’s photography!
Photos taken 11 June 2026