Stop 4 – Middle of Westminster Bridge
We walked through the underpass and then back up to the bridge, so now we were on the other side. The first challenge was to capture images of the Millennium Wheel.
The settings for this pitch should be familiar by now.
ISO100 f/18 for 30 seconds
If you look at the river you can see the lights of the river traffic as red and blue streaks.
We then turned our attention to the traffic passing over the bridge itself. I had never tried taking long exposures of traffic before so this was also a new experience.
ISO100 f/20 for 20 seconds
Advice for next time I attempt shots like this is to take another image exposed for Big Ben so that I can later merge the two images together. Shooting images of the Wheel through the railings were attempted by others in the group and these looked very different to my image above.
We were joined by groups of tourists at everyone of our stops. They were mainly curious about what we were doing and joined in the fun with their smartphones. This group decided to stand and take pictures as I was shooting long exposures of the traffic!
My last image on the bridge was back to the Millennium Wheel and taken off the tripod after my short break into street photography above.
Stop 5 – The Victoria Embankment
Time was passing and we walked back over the bridge and turned to walk up the Victoria Embankment past Boudicca’s statue and the Westminster pier. We walked until we were opposite the Millennium Wheel.
The challenge here was to take the Wheel AND the full moon. Exposing for only one worked for that part of the view only and I didn’t manage to get a satisfactory image of both. Others in the group were trying HDR images using multiple images etc etc.
As our last challenge of the evening was a bit of fun. We set our cameras up on our tripods again and did some deliberate movement by altering the focal length of our zoom lenses.
The full moon is the white streak!
Our three hour photo walk was now over and as I made my way back along the Victoria Embankment I stopped to take an image of one of the airmen in the Battle of Britain Memorial there.
