City of London

Massive gap between posts again, apologies! Mix of busyness and laziness. First time I've had to revise for anything since GCSE; I am not enjoying it.

But! The other day I went to the City of London to meet my dad for coffee. I took my camera and got a few shots. Below are a couple:

St. Pancras

So I didn't get the time for a second post before the end of February like I wanted to. But! I do have an excuse. Most of my deadlines are in the next three weeks, then comes exam period! So I have actually been busy for once in my life.

I went home last weekend to do some work, which ended up as a pretty unsuccessful pursuit. On the way back to uni though, I had a wander around St. Pancras International station. I'd had a brief look round on the way home a couple of days before, but I hadn't ventured to the upper levels where the Eurostar leaves from. It's a pretty amazing place; a really cool mix of modern and Victorian architecture. I'm a big fan of architecture and this place was right up my street.

I got a few snaps of the place on my phone (I didn't have my camera with me). Here's a couple I've uploaded:

































The first photo is a sculpture next to the platform, and the second is the shopping area on the lower level.

Black and White

I've never taken a photo with the intention of it being black and white. It's never something I've given a great deal of thought to until recently. I've played around with a couple of photos from my collection in the past, and they look reasonable in black and white, such as the photo below:

I took this in Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. It was around 100˚ when I took the photo, and I don't think that the colour version of the photo really shows that, wheres the black and white version does. I also prefer the black and white one because it adds a sense of loneliness; something I think that Black and White is very effective in expressing.


A more recent attempt demonstrates this to a greater extent. This is the view from my university room, during the irritatingly-named "Big Freeze" of early 2010.

I like the colour version a lot; I think the mix of the brutalist architecture and the solitary character make it feel quite lonely already, but I put a black and white effect on it, played around with the blue colour levels, the exposure, and the contrast, and I ended up with this:

I effectively just made the photo darker, but I'm really pleased with how it came out. The buildings and the trees contrast with the sky more effectively than in the colour version, and the character in the picture draws the eye in now that he's much darker than before.