After leaving the office, I walked around Thomas More Square looking for a good vantage point, as I've always thought that this building offered some excellent photo opportunities. I found a viewpoint where the Centon 18-28 super wide angle zoom could get in the whole of the tall part of the building, plus the highly reflective buildings on each side. Unfortunately, light levels differed too much and the foreground was hopelessly underexposed. However, a chance glance at the magnified image revealed that by cropping in on one corner of my picture, I cut out most of the underexposed areas and created an interesting off-centre picture. I have blended a slight watercolour effect with the original material to produce this pleasing image.
Then I walked through St Katharines Docks, but felt that I didn't manage to better any of my hand-held shots from 29th September. After exiting the docks area, I walked across Tower Bridge with the aim of photographing Tower Bridge, the Tower of London and the City Pier again.
My first objective was the Tower of London. My viewpoint was slightly downstream from where I stood on 29th August, and I think the 29th September vantage point may have been better, but with a telephoto lens I was able to fill the frame of my viewfinder and obtained some worthwhile shots. Incidentally, it was at this stage, when I looked at my processed slides, that I realised that something in the 35-80mm Pentax zoom lens setup was causing starbursts around light sources on many of my pictures. It's rather attractive here, but sometimes it got in the way.
The next objective was Tower Bridge. I got my tripod set up and I took my shots, when another photographer turned up and had found out that Tower Bridge was just about to be raised. So I left my camera set up and I waited, and sure enough, up went the bridge, and a Thames sailing barge, or wherry, came through! (Under engine power, not sail.) While the bridge was raised, I took the shot shown here. The raised carriageway is in the path of one of the floodlights, making this a better shot than those with the road in place. The three towers at Canary Wharf are also framed in the open span of the bridge.
Unfortunately, the light was fading by the time Tower Bridge went up, and this shot would have been better a half hour earlier. It also put me behind schedule light-wise for the rest of the pictures I wanted to take, but I proceeded nevertheless.
I was particularly pleased with the picture I took on 29th August of City Pier, and I wanted to see if I could take an even better one with the aid of a tripod. The slightly later time has added an interesting brown colour to the sky, and I've blended a slight watercolour effect with the original material in an effort to bring out the masts of the wherries moored at City Pier. One of these was the vessel for which Tower Bridge had opened.
Having taken my City Pier shot, I looked around for something to finish my roll of film on, and decided to have a go at photographing the Belfast. She was really not well enough lit, and her floodlights were an odd colour which caused the dark blue paint on her bow to blend into the background. There was also another ship moored on her starboard side. Anyway, have a go I did, and I got a very red toned result, but with insufficient detail showing. Running a watercolour special effect and then blending it with the original improved matters considerably and resulted in this dramatic shot with its red background.
With just one shot left on my roll of film, I pointed tripod and camera across the river towards The City. It is too dark to make out the outlines of the buildings, apart from where they are lit up. The former NatWest Tower is at the left end of the picture. It now sports a lit "42" near its top. (The National Westminster Bank moved out after the IRA bombed the tower and it was initially thought that it might need to be demolished.) This tower and the BT Tower used to be the two tallest buildings in London prior to the construction of Canary Wharf. And now that two further towers have been constructed there, this tower is going even further down the height ranks.
These pictures turned out almost completely differently from my 29th August pictures. I don't say that all of them, or even any of them, are better than those pictures. They are just different. I will probably return for yet more viewpoints as and when weather and time permit.
