When I first began Photography I absolutely loved shooting Cityscapes at night. My most favourite spot to shoot was in London, around the Southbank area.

If any of you ever visit London, a highly recommend shooting around Southbank. You are right by the London Eye, which is also right next to Embankment Bridge, and only minutes away from Westminster. There are plenty of things to shoot around here, and I absolutely love it there.

Gear

At this point, I was just at the very beginning stages of my Photography life and only had a Nikon D7000 and 50mm f/1.4G. With this setup I was assisting a professional photographer trying to gain some experience in the field.

This setup of Nikon D7000 and 50mm lens was not ideal for landscape shooting, so with a borrowed Canon 1000d and Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6, I went out to my favourite spot in London to see what I could get.

Prior to my Photography life, I had been to Southbank many times, but only after starting up Photography, I then looked at things differently. I began to really appreciate what the London Eye is, and what an accomplishment it is to be built. I then decided I wanted to capture an image of the London Eye in its entirety.

How I Shot It

I first took a shot from across the River Thames and found this angle slightly dull, so I decided to go right at the base of the London Eye to capture this shot.

The London Eye throughout the day is in constant motion, so I had to wait for the London Eye not to be in operation, and I went to shoot this around 10pm at night.

Settings: 10mm, ISO200, f/4.5, 4sec

How I Edited It

The basic editing for this image was fairly basic as all I did was increased the contrast to +50, decreased the blacks to -50, enabled lens correction profile, and added a slightly vignette.

At this point I unfortunately realised there were a few light bulbs which had gone out on the London Eye itself. This is obviously out of my hands and I have since been back to re-shoot this shot, however this shot is one of my first shots and therefore I hold a lot of sentiment to it and decided to rectify this issue of the bulbs being out with a little Photoshopping.

I imported into Photoshop CS5, created another layer and flipped one layer horizontally. I then aligned the image up so the London Eye was directly on top of one another, and then simply used Layer-Masks to paint in the missing bulbs to get this as the final result.

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