One of the things that Baba wanted to see while he was here in London was the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.  Specifically, he wanted to see the three prototype clocks that were created in order to allow people to keep time aboard ships (and thus be able to chart longitude).

It’s on the other side of London from us, so a few trains later we arrived at the Cutty Sark station and started to make our way through Greenwich Park.  It’s always a busy area with tourists and there’s quite a few good reasons.  One of which is the top of the hill makes for a great photographic spot with brilliant views of Canary Wharf dominating the skyline.

We did a few portrait shots outside and then paid the admission fee to enter the observatory.  It’s an interesting museum of sorts, with an emphasis on nautical history which doesn’t generally interest me.  There were some interesting sights to photograph though, so that always keeps me busy.

I think my favourite part of the experience was seeing the green laser that’s projected out along the meridian up close.  It’s really intense and you can see it for miles on the top of the hill.  It looks rather cool firing through Canary Wharf in the distance if you ask me.

After that, we were off to our favourite pub in London.  The Prospect of Whitby is a great old pub that always has excellent ales on tap and the food is pretty good as well.  We’re always sitting upstairs in the small room that used to house bare knuckle boxing matches (according to a plaque on one of the walls).   They also claim that the table nearest the window in this room was a personal favourite of Queen (or princess?  I don’t recall) Anne.

To be honest, they had me at ‘excellent ales’ anyway.

More images of the day in the gallery.

We went back to Canary Wharf again this weekend after our slightly failed attempt a couple of weeks ago.  This time we jumped through the proper hoops and got a permit to be there, so the security guards (who were all very friendly) weren’t able to send us packing.

Ian wasn’t able to make it this week due to a football related knee injury, so I was joined by none other than Lee Crawley from Crawley (the gent who created my new toaster icon).  He’s done some cool light painting in the past, but I believe this was his first orb outing.

We even tried to combine our 2 light painting styles as seen in the above image (the light ribbon to the left), and even more so in this shot.

Still kicking myself for not creating a proper orb in this shot, but I could only manage a 1 minute exposure so had to do all of that in the time available.

This is the first time I’m posting watermarked images, which I know can be a bit annoying.  They are however at almost twice the resolution I used to post images at, so there’s good news with the bad.

The rest are in the gallery here!

ps:  thanks again to Ian for sorting out the permit for us, and to Lee for being my trigger man and making sure my compositions were ok while I spun the orbs.

Well, sort of.  The plan was to head into Canary Wharf and take a few shots in some predetermined locations with my new orb tools.  That plan was quickly kyboshed by the (friendly) security guards in Canary Wharf.  They quickly detailed the area in which we weren’t allowed to shoot which, by chance or by karmic bad luck, happened to cover every spot I was hoping to visit.

They were nice enough to explain how to go about getting permission to shoot there however.  After my impending company has left and Danni and I have returned from our trip to Greece I plan on doing just that and going back to get the shots I wanted.

Here is the one and only shot we (Ian Schofield and I) managed to get before being moved along.

The rest were taken (in almost child like defiance) from across the water but facing back into the area we weren’t allowed to photograph.

We were actually approached by another security guard in this last location, but he didn’t seem to mind what we were doing.  He was just curious I think.

I have learned that it’s very hard to find a good location in London that’s dark enough to get these orbs to turn out well.  Everywhere is so brightly lit that the light pollution makes everything fade away into the background.  I believe it simply calls for brighter orbs!

Few more in the gallery here.

A rather large group of guys (15? 16 maybe?) from the Photography on the Net forums descended on Canary Wharf for a day long photography outing.

It was a blast to get out with other photogs for the day to see some of the different styles and lens choices people were using. There are some great shots turning up on the message board in a thread dedicated to the day. Check em out!

Here are a couple of mine that turned out alright, and the rest are here.