 |
December 2, 2008 |
  |
Created and Maintained by: The Photoimaging Information Council |
|
|
by Greg Isaacson |
|
The time was 9 AM. I had just pulled into London King’s Cross station, after a slumberous journey from York, England. I needed to be at Heathrow airport at 4 PM to catch my flight to New York. Subtracting the travel time to Heathrow, I had about six hours in which to see as much of London as humanly possible. I knew nothing about the city. I had never visited before, and I had no guidebook. My gear consisted of a map and a Panasonic DMC-FZ7 digital camera. With gear in hand, I set out into the labyrinth of London.  © 2007 Greg Isaacson
The first problem that presented itself was how to get around. The subway system (called the Underground) proved entirely confusing. Perhaps I was just in a state to be easily confused. In any case, I did not want to risk miscalculating and finding myself out of change and miles from my destination. If the Underground was bewildering, taking a bus was out of the question. Taxis were too expensive. I would have to settle for the simplest, most traditional and time-tested method of locomotion: walking. Or, given the time constraints I was under, sprinting.  © 2007 Greg Isaacson
The next problem was what to see. Though a combination of luck and sheer touristic exuberance (and in spite of a pair of shoes not well-suited for athletic motion), I managed to visit, or at least get somewhat close to, most of the famous attractions in the city. My first stop was the magnificent St. Paul’s Cathedral, its dome (the third largest in the world) rising high above the London rooftops in baroque splendor. The cathedral, completed in the early eighteenth century, was miraculously spared during a devastating Nazi bombing raid. Sadly, I could not linger at this marvelous edifice.  © 2007 Greg Isaacson
Moving east, I reached London Bridge spanning the Thames, from which I was offered a glorious view of the iconic Tower Bridge farther to the east, looming over the glittering river. Then it was on to Southwark (pronounced “Suth-uck”) Cathedral, a beautiful but unfortunately not very frequented church, which is perhaps most notable as the burial place of Shakespeare’s brother Edmund (Shakespeare himself worked nearby, in Southwark). A two-pound (about four-dollar) photography pass enabled me to walk around the cathedral, taking pictures.  © 2007 Greg Isaacson
Photographing the interiors of cathedrals is often difficult because lighting is poor in such a vast and cavernous space. Professional photographers use external flashes to help illuminate the scene, but for everyone else, an ordinary tripod is sufficient. The trick is to stabilize the camera while the shutter is open during a long exposure. At Southwark Cathedral, I happened to have a cheap mini-tripod which was just sturdy enough to hold my Panasonic immobile while I took exposures anywhere from 1- to 8-seconds long.  © 2007 Greg Isaacson
If I didn’t have a tripod, I would still have been in luck. The Panasonic DMC-FZ7 has a feature called Optical Image Stabilizer, which automatically compensates for handshake and thus minimizes blurring under low light conditions (when exposures tend to be slow) or when shooting with high zoom. This feature has proved extremely useful when I’ve held the camera in hand, as for example when walking down a street at night. Indeed, for a non-pro who lacks equipment and advanced skills, the Panasonic is both handy and blissfully easy to use. All I have to do for clear and vivid photos is to set the mode dial to “P” (as in “Program”) and let the camera do the rest. If I crave more control over my photos, I can simply switch the dial to “M” (“Manual”), and a tiny joystick on the back of the camera lets me quickly adjust a wide range of variables, from aperture size to ISO setting to image compression format.  © 2007 Greg Isaacson
The next stop, after passing by the palatial Victoria Embankment Gardens and the enormous London Eye, was the Houses of Parliament, with venerable Big Ben peering out over the Thames and Westminster Abbey. Then it was a dash down the broad, beautiful Birdcage Walk, running alongside the verdant St. James’s Park, to the stately Buckingham Palace, in front of which towers the Queen Victoria Memorial, the symbolic hub of the old British Empire. But alas, I could not dwell on this, or any other monument. The airport beckoned.  © 2007 Greg Isaacson
Walking through London is an exceedingly confusing experience without a map. As Edward Jones and Christopher Woodward point out in A Guide to the Architecture of London, the city has never undergone a systematic reconstruction the way, for example, Paris did under Baron Haussmann, who carved great avenues and boulevards through the French capital, destroying countless old buildings and streets in the process. London, which never had a Haussmann to reorganize it, is notable for its looseness of structure, which makes life difficult for tourists. A trip to the Underground proved necessary at last. And then it was goodbye to London, but far too soon: “When a man is tired of London,” said Samuel Johnson, “he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”  © 2007 Greg Isaacson
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
© 2002 - 2008 Take Great Pictures |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
