The Artful Engineer

There is a dearth of proper castles in the United States, so they are always fun places for me to visit in Europe. In the image above, the clock face provides a convenient reflective surface to give the composition a bright anchor point. The image below, of Dover Castle, uses a similar trick with the high window, but with a subtler result.

The thing that attracted me to the composition below was the juxtaposition of towers: Big Ben, St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster Hall (along the right hand edge), and the shadows of Westminster Cathedral.

Our last full day in Europe was a beautiful spring day. At Windsor Castle, the yellow and white daffodils were in full bloom around the base of the Round Tower. The composition below emphasizes the backlit flowers and provides just a hint of the castle battlements above.

On our visit to Windsor, I only brought my 40mm lens for the day. It’s not as flexible as my usual 24-120mm zoom, but much smaller. In cases where a wider view is desired, taking several images with the intent of stitching them into a panorama later is a useful technique. Here I took two images—one high and one low—and combined them into a more expansive vertical view:

Here I made five separate images with the frame oriented vertically and stitched them together into a wide view of the castle walls. Even handheld, most of the time this technique works very well, especially if there aren’t foreground elements very close to the camera.

I’ll end this set of images with this interesting chicken-wire elephant sculpture from the Tower of London. I have no explanation for why this sculpture is at the Tower of London, but it was well-executed.

I hope you enjoyed these images from England. I am planning two more posts to wrap up our visit to England before turning the blog’s attention, at long last, to Rome.