The Artful Engineer

Since our London hotel was in South Kensington, we walked the length of Hyde Park and St James’s Park (which run east-west and touch corner-to-corner) several times to reach Westminster Abbey and the surrounding area. There are a lot nice trees along this route, and four of this week’s images are from Hyde Park alone.

The brick building in the background, above, is Kensington Palace. We only walked by it, but were rewarded with a nice view of this amazing tree which was covered in a thin layer of moss that positively glowed. I had decided to carry my fast 85mm on this walk, and was rewarded with the opportunity to exploit the shallow depth of field at f/1.8. The tree would have popped against the building regardless, but the wide aperture helps it stand out again the tree behind it. Fortunately, for whatever reason, that second tree is not covered in the same luminescent moss; had it been, this angle would not have worked.

This next image was not taken in Hyde Park, but about a block south of it. I really love the twists and turns the branches make in a tree like this, and the only time to really see them is from late fall to early spring. I thought this was a great tree. This is the only frame I took, and I wish that I had tried a few wider apertures, too. As it is, all of the branches are sharp, which is nice, but so is the building in the background. The biggest challenge with this image is the middle row of windows: since they are set back behind a walkway, they are quite a bit darker than the others. In the end, I decided to lighten up the windows on the left side of this row so that the tree didn’t blend into them, which helped a lot. Obviously, if the building was a plain wall, there wouldn’t be any visual competition for the tree, but the geometric contrast between the manmade straight lines and the natural curly branches is what this image is about.

If you didn’t like having to visually parse the subject from the background in the previous image, you should find this next one a little easier:

Both of these silhouettes—the preceding and the following—are tight crops of their respective trees. Since they do not include the whole tree, or even an edge, they don’t offer any clue about the trees’ overall shapes, but are just a opportunity to enjoy the dense pattern of branches. Of course, the silhouettes also rob us of any sense of depth within the trees themselves, which make the patterns of branches appear even denser.

This next image contrasts the shapes of three trees and a tall building. There is a lot of black in this image, and the only reason it works is probably because of the sprinkling of lit windows in the building. The vertical gradient in the sky is also helpful, I think, because the darker sky at the top helps balance the blackness at the bottom of the frame, and the bright lower portion gives the eye somewhere to hang on to. Regardless, the windows in the center hold their own as the subject.

I went through a lot of iterations with this next image: how much to crop it, how much to correct the perspective, and whether to darken the reflections in the top half of the window. In the end, I left the reflections as they were—they look lighter on the top half because there is a white window-shade behind the glass—and only corrected the verticals. I think what makes this an interesting image is the very orderly pattern of colored bricks contrasting with an inset of chaotic, black-and-white, abstract-looking reflected silhouetted tree branches. The combined effect is strange and disconcerting.

Having now shared a sampling of my images from York, Cambridge, and London, the blog will now shift its attention from England to Belgium for the next month. I hope you’ve enjoyed the journey so far and will come back for the rest of it!