Sonata - a photo on Flickriver

Sonata

Nearly a week after the attack on Westminster, I felt that the most hopeful image I could publish -- and indeed one of the most hopeful things I know of -- would be one of London's landmarks at sunrise. I last photographed the Queen's Walk riverside next to the More London complex nearly two years ago, and although my fondness for photographing vibrant skies at dawn hasn't changed over the years, London feels like a very different place now than it did then. With this image, my aim was still to convey the optimism and warmth of a beautiful spring sunrise, but at the same time to visualise the tireless dedication of the civil service inside City Hall, and perhaps to hint at the city's darker undertones in the shadows.

I was fortunate enough to capture the sunrise I'd been hoping for this past Saturday, with this image consisting of a blend of exposures taken over the course of an hour, starting with the early-morning lights during blue hour and finishing a few minutes before sunrise when the sky had lit up. I began by combining nine bracketed exposures in Photoshop using luminosity masks -- for the moment excluding the brightest two exposures -- which had been captured just as the sky was turning a reddish orange and when there was a rich colour in the sky as well as a sufficient amount of detail in the shadows along the riverside. I then incorporated the cityscape's lights captured during blue hour using the Lighten blend mode, which added light to the offices inside City Hall as well as enhancing the lighting inside the riverside lamps and Tower Bridge. After this, I isolated the sky and used an exposure captured during golden hour, setting this to the Linear Light blend mode and lowering the opacity to around 30%, which added a subtle warmth and tonality along the horizon.

With this phase of the workflow complete, I used the Pen Tool to isolate the steps outside City Hall -- also known as the Scoop -- and used my two brighter exposures with the Luminosity blend mode along with radial gradient masks to gently enhance the topside of the steps. This seemed effective as a way of creating leading lines towards City Hall and the bridge and sunrise in the distance, and it also seemed to emphasise a nice element of foreground visual interest. After this, I used a combination of Colour Balance, Hue/Saturation and Selective Colour layer adjustments to tone down the yellow light inside City Hall, and to gradually shift the architecture towards a chillier tone. I then applied two low-opacity Colour Lookups -- one for the sky, using the Soft Warming preset, and one for the riverside and City Hall, using the Moonlight preset -- and set both of these to Soft Light.

Inside Colour Efex Pro and Silver Efex Pro, I spent a little time adjusting the structure and tonal contrast of the image, mostly with the aim to soften detail around the Scoop so that the viewer's eye would be drawn to the light in the distance rather than the foreground texture. I also significantly lowered the midtone exposure and dynamic brightness, which helped to enhance the drama of the sunrise, and at the same time to bring out the scene's darker undertones. In the end a pretty sunrise is still a pretty sunrise, but there was something cathartic about pushing the final result towards a more sombre, muted and perhaps more unsettling take on this classic vantage point.

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Taken on: March 25, 2017

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Camera: Nikon D800, f/13.0, 0.6 sec, 24mm, ISO 100 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Nikon D800
Lens:	24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8
Aperture:	f/13.0
Exposure Time:	0.6
Focal Length:	24mm
ISO:	100
Exposure Bias:	-1 EV
Flash:	Off, Did not fire
Exposure Program:	Aperture-priority AE
Exposure Mode:	Auto
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Saturation:	Low
Color Space:	sRGB
Software:	Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 6.6.1 (Windows)
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