This weekend I visited London with friends from choir. It wasn’t your average tourist outing though – we had tickets to go to the top of the Shard. This new building is the tallest in the EU and has the highest viewing platform in the UK. We went up at about 3:30 and stayed until sunset. The weather has been bleak recently but we were treated to a magnificent golden hour, followed by an intense orange sunset which turned pink just before the sun went down. What a fantastic day!
I shot hundreds and hundreds of photos, but I’ve whittled it down to a select few for your viewing pleasure. I’m also trying out a new mosaic-style photo gallery for the first time. These photos absolutely must be seen in large mode – click and use the arrows to move through.
Jonathan Gazeley 
Absolutely amazing view, and stupendous photography, Jonathan!
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Thanks! It was wonderful to be up there and we were lucky with the weather 🙂
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Amazing work mate, what an experience and good weather for it! I love the orange ‘sunset over London’. Didn’t know you did much HDR these days.
In ‘St Pauls Cathedral’ you can see where I work, pretty much in the middle of the top right quater.
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I don’t usually use HDR unless there is a good reason. The sun was low in the sky and the lighting was difficult to work with. I didn’t want to risk ending up with a bunch of duff photos, so I bracketed every single shot I took, whether I needed to or not. Later on at home, I converted some of these bracketed sets of images into HDR to bring out detail in the sky and the foreground. If I hadn’t used HDR, either the foreground would have been black, or the sky would have been washed out. Most of the shots that don’t include bright sky are not HDR.
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