Landscape-framing
I shoot cities the way most people shoot mountains. Canary Wharf is terrain to me; the docks are valleys, the towers are ridgelines, and the Thames is the river it has always been, just running through glass and steel instead of granite. That's the frame I bring to urban landscape work, and it's why I keep coming back to this particular square mile of London. Everyone photographs the skyline. I'm more interested in the weather sitting on it, the way the water holds the last of the light, and what the whole place looks like when you stop treating it as architecture and start treating it as ground.
Timing is where I do most of my work. All four of these were made inside the same narrow blue-hour window; that fifteen-minute stretch when the sky still has colour and texture in it, but the interior lights have come on and started carrying the buildings. Ten minutes early and the towers are dead. Ten minutes late and the sky is a black hole. I've learned to be in position and waiting rather than arriving and hoping, and that patience is what separates these frames from the version of this view that gets posted a thousand times a week.
I compose for depth. In the wide frames I use the near tower as an anchor; something solid for the eye to stand on before it travels back across the dock, past the moored boats, out to the cranes on the horizon. In the near-vertical shot I go the opposite way entirely: straight down, everything flattened into graphics, the diagonal of the road and the ribbed roof of the station and the pale geometry of the buildings doing all the talking. Pattern first, place second. Both approaches are deliberate, and I like having them in the same set.
In the edit I hold back. The night frame across the peninsula is the hardest of the four; an enormous range between the sodium wash on the streets and the dark water; and the temptation is always to crush the shadows and push the saturation until it looks like a film poster. I don't. I want the colour to describe what was actually there: the particular amber-and-LED mix of east London after dark, the O2's masts on the left, the reflections stretching down the river. Restraint is a skill I've worked at, and I think it's the reason these images still look like London a year from now rather than like a pre-set.