The Artful Engineer

In March we visited London for a few days as a stopover on our way to a family vacation in Rome. While I made a lot more images of Rome, I wanted to share the ones from London (and a few nearby places) before turning our attention to Rome.

I always like to have a theme that gives the weekly blog some visual coherency, and settled on silhouettes for this week. I made the image above of the ceiling in St. Pancras station while we were waiting for the train to Dover. (More on Dover in a couple weeks.) I like the graphic high-contrast look with lots of black, a single color (blue), and only a little white. The fact that the white beam outside the windows runs counter to the direction of everything else gives it more strength as an accent. The reflections give the image a little texture and shape, too, offering a little relief from what would otherwise feel very stark.

I do seem to have a penchant for images that are exclusively black, blue, and white, a high-contrast color palette that this next image exploits. I suppose that since blue skies are abundant in the world and it is easy to silhouette things, two of the three ingredients are usually near at hand. In this image, I did tone down the brick building in the bottom left corner (and the bright red crane hiding down there, too) to keep the emphasis on the primary black-blue-white color scheme. There is some extra shape contrast here, too, between the organic tree branches and the repeating line of windows. The windows also echo the sky by reflecting it, which keeps the lower right section of the image from being overly dark and featureless, as well as preserving the visibility of the tree branches in the darker areas.

This next image is a bit of an experiment, again using the black-blue-white motif, but this time pretty heavy on the black. I tried to lighten up the interior just enough so that it wasn’t completely black, although I think converting the image to JPEG to post here seems to have crushed them back for the most part. Not a resounding success, but worth trying.

There were many opportunities late in the day when the warm light raked across the tops of buildings. Here it was clipping the chimneys and I added the silhouetted lamppost to balance out the image and break up the expanse of blue.

Here is another lamppost, silhouetted against a patch of late day sunlight that has managed to nearly reach street level.

This final image exploits a day where the haze sucked the color out of the sky to the point that the resulting image is nearly hueless: there are just very faint blues and oranges left. I don’t usually increase the saturation on images, but did here to upgrade the color from barely perceptible to subtle.

Wandering around London with a camera never disappoints me. I hope you enjoyed doing the same, if only vicariously. I look forward to sharing more images over the next couple weeks and hope you’ll be back to see them!