Sep 1

Sep 1 Look Kids, Big Ben, Parliament

I was doing some travelling last week and I was in Brussels for the first few days (more on that in another post) but for the weekend, I got to go to London as a birthday present! Amazingly enough, I’ve only ever been to London once before, which is kind of crazy as I’m only a short plane journey away, but anyway. I had a great time, and I wasn’t really taking too many pictures, as it was a holiday and I just wanted to take it all in and relax.

However, on one of the evenings my wife and I convinced each other to overcome our fears and go up the London eye. And of course, I couldn’t not take a camera! We tried to time it so that we’d be there for dusk, but by the time we got tickets and made it onto the capsule we just caught the tail end of it. It was a great experience though and I’m really happy with the shots that I took.

I was using my little Fuji X-E1 with the XF18–55mm lens. What amazed me was that the image stabilisation in that fuji lens is remarkable. All of these shots were hand-held on a moving platform and the shutter-speeds were around 1/10th of a second. You can see light trails from the cars and busses, and yet a good deal of the shots were still sharp and without shake.

The image above is my favourite because there’s still some light in the sky. Here’s a few more that I took while we did the circle around. Enjoy!

A closeup of Big Ben and Parliament at Night

All shots were taken at ISO 1600. I processed the images using Photo Ninja, Lightroom and a bit of Photoshop. there was a good bit of noise in the files, especially because they were dark and I did bring them up a little, but Photo Ninja uses Picture Code's Noise Ninja noise reduction (which they're famous for) and so it cleaned them up nicely. The only thing was that there was some reflections from the glass of the capsule. I cleaned it up in some of the shots, but it's still visible in a few.