I had some time between finishing work and meeting up with a good friend of mine a few weeks ago – the weather was good, so I went into the City with a view to getting some photographs of the Shard now that it is finished (well, on the outside at least).

I took this shot from Tower Bridge – no tripod, but the camera was on my Pod (essentially a bean bag with a screw thread – got mine from Jessops) – it’s stable once settled, but can be a bit tricky to get things into the right position initially (getting the “beans” to move around).

Post processing, as usual, in Lightroom 5 – I’ve had Lightroom for some time, since v3 days, but not really used it much, I had always used Photoshop.  After I started following Scott Kelby on Google+, I came across Serge Ramelli – I bought some of his video tutorials (you can find some taster lessons on YouTube), and my post processing in Lightroom improved considerably – I find it quicker than Photoshop – sure, I can’t do everything that Photoshop can, but it can do most – and, of course, you can export to Photoshop, do what is required and then, pull the result back into Lightroom – I do this occasionally, mainly for panoramas.

So, this photograph has been edited in a similar way to how Serge teaches – lower the highlights, raise the shadows, set Camera Calibration(Landscape, in this case) – I added a gradient to balance the sky (I must dig out and use my grads at capture again…on this occasion, I was traveling light), then adding some highlights were needed.

It would probably have been better to take the photograph an hour or so later – there would have been more lights on, but there was more I wanted to see, closer to The Shard – those shots I will leave for a later post!

Technical details:

Nikon D80; 18-70mm lens @18mm; f/10; 1/25s; ISO 200 – “sort of tripod” Pod– post processing in Lightroom 5