On Wednesday, June 26, my family boarded an overnight flight to London for the start of a two week vacation. I hope you don’t mind my taking a break from Marblehead images to share some of my favorites from this trip.

We arrived in London on Thursday morning and stayed there until Sunday when we flew to our next destination. In those three days, we would walk over 20 miles from our AirBnB flat in Marylebone to Covent Garden, Buckingham Palace (for the changing of the guard), Westminster to board a boat ride up the Thames River, Borough Market and out to Camden Market among other locations.

On Saturday night, after dinner with the family, I headed off for the tube station at Bond Street and exited at London Bridge. From there, I spent some time capturing views of Millennium Bridge as the sun set and caught Tower Bridge rising to let a large boat pass underneath. As dusk approached, I walked down Bankside to Tower Bridge where I set up my tripod for this long exposure. I had envisioned this image when we passed by the plaque for Tower Bridge the day prior and hoped I could get the lights of traffic streaming by with a long exposure. The other benefit of a thirty second shot was to help remove people from the final image as their fleeting appearance across the sensor over a half minute meant there was little there to see.

The end result of the capture exceeded my expectations. The red bus heading to (or from) Shoreditch was added to help complete the composition. Right before this frame, I had taken another with traffic stopped on the bridge and this bright red bus gleaming in the last light of the blue hour. I decided to take a bit of creative license in merging the bus from the prior exposure with this one to create a more interesting final composition of Tower Bridge and the bright red bus.

If you would like to see the rest of my London gallery on my non-Marblehead site, click the link below (on Instagram, click link in profile): https://orenphotography.com/photos/london/