London

Some photographers go to extraordinary lengths to capture an image that they want.

Otto Berkley describes how he managed to get this picture of the Thames in London.

“This is an image I’d had in my head for a while, but I had to wait until recently for the right weather conditions, position of the sun and a low tide on the Thames. The end result is a combination of exposures captured over two hours, creating a mixture of late-afternoon sunshine hitting the buildings and early-evening lights along the skyline.

The image is made from two long-exposure shots captured with a 10-stop neutral density filter: a five-minute exposure at sunset to create a warm glow on the buildings, and then an additional eight-minute exposure once the sun had gone down, which further smoothed out the Thames and removed the traffic on Tower Bridge. I then blended these with a capture at dusk, which incorporates the lights in the buildings and on the bridge, and finally blended these with a one-minute exposure at twilight, which added the reflections of the lights along the river and the starbursts in the lights along the barge in the foreground.”

If you go to https://www.flickr.com/photos/99194469@N08/16810201075/in/explore-2015-03-14 you can download the image in various sizes but be aware that the author has set “All Rights Reserved” for his work.