London!

South West Trains have a 'Summer Fever' offer on weekends during August, where return Salisbury to London Waterloo is £15, a saving of over 60%!

Not being able to resist this, and wanting to try out the Nikkor 10-24mm ultrawide zoom up in the Big Smoke, I jumped on the 5.45 train, chatted with the lovely and bubbly Katie, who was on her way to St Pancras for the Eurostar to Paris and a start of a week's holiday in the south of France. Point being is that I (eventually) told her about blip and she's going to look me up on her return, then she said she was going to buy herself a bridge camera, join a camera club and possibly Blip herself too!! So, not just a most agreeable way to waste an hour and a half of train journey but also helping the Blip cause...

From Waterloo, I walked to the London Eye (as any tourist does) then slowly, over 3 hours, made my way along the south bank, to Tower Bridge, taking in graffiti, The Shard, and these buildings around County Hall. They are between the Shard and the 'Armadillo' but don't know exactly which or who they belong to...

It was dull, nearly all the time that I was up there. It did brighten up quite a bit later but having walked back to meet my good friend at Trafalgar Square, along Cannon St, Fleet St, via St Paul's etc, I was not able to go back to the south bank to re-shoot.

So, a long long rather tiring walk, with the pressured bustle of London, swathes of tourists to try and get out the way out of and 100's of pics. Some were carefully framed and shot, others rather point and shoot, tourist-style.

There were areas of this image that were so dense and impenetrable, despite it being dull, that I had to eek out shadow detail that wasn't there! Then a mono conversion, a 180 degree flip, a few more shadows/contrast bits etc and whether this is my best image from the day is debatable but I wanted to show one that I definitely could NOT have taken in Salisbury! - and one not too iconic or touristy, either.

Now, really rather tired, I'll get back to commenting on all your lovely journals in the morning. So, please do bear with me...

Thanks too for hoisting my Fields of Gold well up into the Spotlight yesterday - and this graphic architectural Blip is as far removed from that lush and colourful countryside scene.