March 2022 - The Underground (Again!)

Last month, I showed you some of my photos of the London Underground – taken on the first of John’s and my trips. As the pandemic started, we all went into lockdown in late March of 2020, so we only had one more trip. And during March of 2021 we were (well, at least I was) still locked down so there weren’t all that many photos taken that month. 

My first picture can only be from Canary Wharf! Almost everything about this place is photographable – the architecture is grand and varied, the plazas are interesting, and the underground and the DLR stations are pretty stunning too. I thought I’d get the best of both worlds with this picture, taken at the entrance to the Canary Wharf tube station.

Immediately in front of where I was standing are the steps and escalators down to the Ticket Hall – and these are imposing enough in their own right – while behind me is one of the central plazas, with parts of the original dock waterways about 20 metres away. 

It is always a good thing, when taking photographs in an urban environment, to look up. Especially in a city business district, where most buildings are taller than the average semi! Very often you’ll find interesting features on these buildings (please ignore, for boredom’s sake, any buildings put up in the 1970’s), and these are often worth taking the time to enjoy and/or to photograph. In this case, the interest for me was seeing the canopy over the Underground entrance sort of framing the buildings surrounding it. 

I used a wide-angle lens so that I could get more in – these lenses can have the effect of making everything look like it is falling in on you – and I rather like the effect it has created. I have converted it to black and white so that the shapes and patterns are emphasised – there is a lot of colour in the original photo but the colours seem to take more attention than the patterns – so I had to get rid of it. 

The clouds in the sky are important as well: without them there the space between the buildings might have looked a bit bare and taken your attention away from the picture. In last month’s article I talked a bit about symmetry, and this is almost a symmetrical picture – in essence it is, but in detail it misses out! For me, the point was that I saw a possibility and was able to take the photo – always worth keeping your eyes open for them!