So, this year was my second attempt (first attempt here) at an all night photo shoot throughout the streets of London.  The plan was to all meet up on one of the shortest nights of the year, stay up all night and end up at Westminster bridge to try and recreate a few of the iconic images seen in the opening sequences of the film 28 Days Later.

We all met up around 7:30 (baring a few stragglers) on the south side of Tower Bridge for a few sunset photo opportunities.  As I have about 200 images of Tower Bridge already, I took a couple of snaps and then spent most of my time chatting with the other folks.

After everyone arrived, I set up a couple of lights and made everyone pose for a big group photo before we started our slow trek to Westminster.

The POTN Gang
L to R: Matt, Steve, Brett, Paul, Neal, Angus, Bonnie, Scott, Me

Our walk took us from Tower Bridge to Westminster Bridge via the Gherkin, Bank, St. Pauls, Smithfields and Holburn before finally catching a bus from the Strand for our final leg of the journey.  We were running short on time to catch sunrise at Westminster, so we’ll plan a bit better next year I think.

While the sunrise we had wasn’t brilliant, it did provide some terrific light at Westminster which enabled me to get the photo I’d had in my head for a few days prior to the outing.

We were expecting the area to be completely quiet, but London being the city is it there was still a fair amount of traffic and quite a few people heading home from a long night out at 4:30 in the morning.  Still, there were few enough people that we got the shots we wanted without having to photoshop anyone out of the scene.

Definitely a great night out and worth the red bull shakes I had the following day.

As always, there are a few more shots in the gallery.

Despite the rain, several hardy POTN members (plus a few guests) made the trek to the Gherkin this past Saturday evening.  The initial plan was just to take a few well intentioned shots of the city; architectural photos of some interesting land marks or bizarre/unique designs.  I had brought some of my lighting gear with the intention of trying a few things out, but quickly learned I hadn’t planned well enough (for uninteresting reasons I won’t bore you with here).

Fortunately, Swaffs was on the ball and had a well working string of Christmas lights that were ideal for what I wanted to try out.  In fact, he had brought it along for the very same reason.  Orbing.

If you’re not familiar with these types of shots, there’s a fairly big assortment of them on Flickr.  There’s a group discussion of orbing here, and Rich was kind enough to make a video of me making one of the orbs here to demystify the process even further.

There’s one or two more orb images in the gallery, plus a few more non-orb images like these two of the Gherkin and Leadenhall Market.