On the road in London
I've been travelling a bit for the last few days and I got to spend some time in London. I've only been in London a few times before and every time I've enjoyed it (well, except tat one time I wasn't well) . This time we decided to stay on the south bank and we had a lovely time. The weather was very mild, and it only rained once. It has been very warm for this time of year, ranging between 12-14 degrees Celsius. We only had a few days, but we managed to pack in as much as possible, including an incredible tour of the BBC and a trip to the top of the Shard. Of course, I took as many photos as possible!
The trip wasn't specifically for photography, so I wanted to travel as light and as simply as possible. I kept it to my long running travel companion, the combination of my trusty Nikon D700 and 28-300mm lens. Now, you may be thinking, wouldn't a mirrorless setup be lighter and simpler. Well, the camera would be, but I would have to bring lots of lenses. I love the flexibility of the 28-300mm nikon. I have yet to see a lens in a similar range that's as good quality wise on any other platform. I know that there are super zooms but there's also the significant fact that I have this lens, and I don't have any equivalent lens for any of my mirrorless cameras (so it would be difficult to bring one that I don't have).
Post processing wise I've done something a little different on this trip. Normally I would import the images into Lightroom on my laptop, and do some basic editing on the road, and then export the project back to my desktop computer when I get home. This time, I really didn't want to be spending much time editing or playing around with the images. I always shoot RAW+JPEG, so for an experiment, I copied all the images to a folder on my computer and then just imported the Jpegs into Apple Photos. This way I could Instagram them when I wanted to, and I can quickly see what I've taken without having to wait for Lightroom to do its thing. For the most part the Jpegs are actually fine, and all the images you see below are straight out of the camera. I will go back and go through the RAWs properly in Lightroom when I get the time, but for the moment, this worked out fine as a quick way to see my images.
Another thing I did was allow Dropbox to use it's auto upload every time I connected a card to my computer. This way I have a backup copy if anything goes wrong. The effectiveness of this depends on your wifi, but I've been lucky so far in that the wifi at the hotels I've been staying in has been pretty good.
Anyway, below is a selection of images from my trip. They are all D700 with 28-300mm lens and are all unmodified, straight out of the camera. The first few shots are of night along the Thames. There's then some shots of the view from the Shard. If you ever get to London and aren't afraid of heights, it's a great experience. Then there are some shots from the great Borough market, followed by some images from a visit to the HMS Belfast. The HMS Belfast is a floating museum on the river. It's a WWII era warship that's been converted to a museum, and is also well worth a trip. Enjoy.
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