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Adagio
Otto Berkeley posted a photo:
!["Adagio"]("http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8754/28404297045_daa8dc0220_m.jpg")
I last photographed Butler's Wharf, the beautiful area south-east of Tower Bridge, at sunrise more than two years ago. Since then, I've frequently thought about revisiting the spot to reshoot it for a cleaner and sharper finish, and earlier in the morning to capture the transition from blue hour to golden hour.
This part of the Thames Path is invariably very busy in the evenings because of the stunning view from its bars and restaurants, yet eerily quiet at dawn, especially during the early light in the summer months, when boat activity along the Thames is at a minimum until around 5am and the reflections in the river remain undisturbed. With all of this in mind, I kept this shoot on hold until a calm morning at the end of May, when wind speeds were low and the skies were clear.
The base exposure for this image was my final shot of the morning, lasting six-and-a-half minutes and perfectly exposing for the pink tones emerging on the horizon, as well as revealing a hint of sunlight along the edge of the Cheesegrater, Heron Tower and the Gherkin. On top of this exposure, I blended in exposures from the start of my shoot, which had begun in darkness, incorporating the night lights along Tower Bridge and inside the neighbouring buildings. Using a combination of the Pen Tool and the Channels panel in Photoshop, I then created selections of the sky, the river and the cityscape, as well as the Thames Path, its lampposts and its railing leading into the distance. This allowed me to selectively focus on each area's tonal contrast, colour balance and exposure, editing a soft and dreamy sky without affecting the high-contrast portions of the cityscape.
Having removed a couple of cranes and an Alcohol Control Area sign attached to one of the lampposts, the final adjustments I made were a mixture of low-opacity Colour Lookups, Gradient Maps and Selective Colour adjustments in Photoshop alongside selective Tonal Contrast adjustments in Colour Efex Pro. This was the most extensive part of the post-processing stage, largely because each individual portion of the image was edited one at a time, but each adjustment was incremental. I wanted to bring out the chilly early-morning tones in the shadows as they were gradually suffused with golden-hour warmth, but at the same time it was important to me to retain the original exposure's clean vibrance and energy, and hopefully to capture the mood and atmosphere while standing there, watching the early-morning light spread across the cityscape.
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