English: Tower In The Middle of the Road By Trevor McClintock

Tower in the Middle of the Road by Trevor McClintock

I took this photo in central London whilst wandering around. I used an aperture of f/8 to ensure that both the foreground and the background were in focus. It was an overcast day so I attempted to blend the sky with the ominous grey building in the background. I used a very quick shutter speed, around 1/1600 to ensure the sky would be an appropriate shade of grey. I took several versions of this image, each with different shutter speeds. Using a lower speed I found the sky would be too dark and overbearing. It took over the composition of the image, and the contrast between the relatively bright buildings and dark sky looked unnatural.

Using a slower speed turned the sky into and overblown mess, all detail was lost and it looked lazy. In terms of framing, I wanted the diagonal lines to lead the viewer’s eyes into the centre of the image. Once centred the grey building in the centre leads the eye upwards. I included the cars at the bottom of the image for scale, without them the photo is difficult for the eye to parse in terms of size; of course this isn’t helped by the distance between the foreground and background.