Smooth waters

Last night I was feeling rather tired and upset about the rubbish train service to our station on a weekend (post pandemic situation) and having to pay so much for a taxi to get home, when I realised that my evening had just got worse as I realised I had left my reading glasses in the taxi. I am useless without them so I will have to order a new pair first thing on Monday morning, annoying as the frames were expensive and rather nice ones too. I have an old pair of glasses from about 3 prescriptions ago, so they will have to make do while I wait to get replacement glasses.

It was a very early start to get to the station this morning - none of the usual three stations around me had trains leaving sufficiently early to get to the London meeting point for the second day of my photography workshop, so I drove to one some distance away that had a train leaving at 06.55am.

When I got to Waterloo Station I decided to walk along the south bank to the Tate Modern (our meeting place), it's quite a long walk but the tubes were so horribly full and stuffy yesterday that I preferred to walk. I had an annoying start to the day as we were shooting the view across to St Paul's at an 8 minute exposure, and the first three attempts of mine failed as I kept getting light leaks between the filters - it was very bright and sunny. In the end I managed to get this shot, but it was the only shot I got as using such long exposures obviously takes time and it was then time to move to the next location.

We got a bus to our next location in the city, and then we walked around the city taking photos around Leadenhall and of all the incredible buildings. London must be one of the best cities in the world for architecture, we have iconic modern buildings with little 400 year old churches stuffed in between and up every alleyway there is always something interesting to see. 

We then walked to a pub for lunch which was followed by a processing technique lesson. We had to bring our laptops today as we then practiced editing an image using his technique. Our camera bags were very heavy today having to carry the camera stuff and a laptop around.

This workshop was all about the long exposure black and white style of Jay's photography. The very long exposures are necessary to get the water or moving clouds as smooth as possible, and then he applies a very complicated technique to convert the images to black and white, using at least 20 layers and relying on curves for dodging and burning. His view is that Photoshop was designed for colour photography and so never achieves the smooth tones that are required for black and white images, but his technique can get that result. It certainly can but it takes a very long time to edit an image using this technique. This image has NOT been edited on his method, I did not have the time and my brain felt rather fried after the photography session today, plus I still need to go through all my notes to see if I can remember how to do it - I doubt it!

It has been a very busy two days and I hope I can remember what I learnt! My journey home was easier today but I am tired so it will be an early night.