Leicester at dusk – John Lewis and Highcross

Choosing the right time for photography can make a huge difference

Click on any image to enlarge

The John Lewis Highcross car park, Leicester.

Part of a commission for a series of large prints showing aspects of Leicester city centre at night.

There isn’t a lot of room to step further back on the busy inner ring road, so a wide angle lens is essential.

A lens with built-in movements such as Canon’s TS-E17mm can be shifted vertically to capture the entire building, whilst maintaining the true vertical lines that can be an essential element of good architectural composition.

Some photographers might claim that you can ‘correct’ the composition in Photoshop. Unfortunately this completely rules out accurate composition for wide shots like this, where you are looking upwards.

With a shot like this it’s also impossible to plan for the streaked lines of passing cars, so sometimes several shots are needed.

This is the sort of photo that often isn’t practical (at anywhere near a reasonable cost) with large format film.

John Lewis store, from the ring road at dusk, Leicester

Even wider views

Although the shifted lens gives a very wide view, it’s often helpful to take shots with a lens shifted up and down, and then merging the images (seamlessly) afterwards.

In this example, one shot supplied the top part of the image, whilst another covered the traffic, allowing a selection that complements the whole image.

Many of the very wide angle square photos in the portfolio and projects are such combined images, giving a coverage that is difficult to achieve in other ways.

Showcase cinema, Leicester

With our latest portable equipment, using a camera like the Canon EOS 5Ds individual photographs are around 50 megapixels, allowing for single images to be comfortably printed  at 66cm x 100cm.

Stitching two images together makes for around 80MP. This easily allows 1 metre square prints, with detail so fine that you need a hand lens to see it.

Larger images with even more detail are readily possible – if you’ve an idea, please give Keith a call, since we love a challenge…

There is a short ‘making a print of a sunset‘ article on the main Northlight site that shows the sort of image and print quality, we now expect as ‘standard’

A larger set of images of this area can be found in Keith’s article on the main Northlight site about how the lighting of buildings changes around sunset.

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