Shortest night photo shoot

While talking to people at my recent exhibition at the Gareth Gardner Gallery I found myself often saying that this is very much a winter project. This got me thinking that while it’s true in practice, it’s far easier when it’s dark at 5pm to shoot for five hours and still made the last train home, it’s more of a convenience than a necessity.

So, with the shortest night approaching I thought I’d see if it were possible to capture images for this project with the least amount of darkness available.

Just before 10pm when I’d normally be looking at catching a train home, I caught a train into London Charing Cross and walked over to the first building on my list, Space House. There was less variety of light striking it as more of the internal lights in the surrounding buildings were off, but a mix of internal security lights, street lights, and some lights from the City Lit building were enough. It was also a delight to see the renovation nearing completion, meaning that this image including a fragment of the canopy was possible.

Space House

After nearly two hours at Space House it was time to move on to the Macadam Building, despite being gone midnight there were still a few internal lights on which rather scuppered my original plans, thankfully the similar Strand building had none on and I got the shot I wanted.

King’s College Strand Building

It was gone 1am by now so I wandered down to the Thames to see if the external lights were off on the National Theatre yet, they weren’t so I headed to St Vincent House behind the National Gallery. One side is a hotel so not ideal for this project, but it was the office side I was more interested in, unfortunately the only major ambient lighting was a glaring streetlight, so I moved on to New Zealand House. This was much more productive, it’s currently undergoing renovation so the floors are empty and it has markedly different lighting striking the two sides I photographed, near ideal.

New Zealand House

By this time it was gone 2am so I headed down to the Thames again to see if the National Theatre’s lights were off yet, thankfully they were so I walked along The Embankment towards it. The particular image I was after was the view from Waterloo Bridge above the BFI, but I took several of the changing viewpoints as I was crossing the bridge. I was glad that I did as the ambient lighting on that side was too weak to compete with the brightening sky, so will have to wait until another day, or just a very early morning in winter. I’m happy with the images I did capture though as they wouldn’t have been possible with the scrolling display and other external lights on.

National Theatre

It was now gone 3am and the sun was well and truly on its way up, so I hopped on a night bus home, very content with the 20 or so images I’d managed to capture and happy that even with the least amount of night time available I was still able to contribute to this project. I am, however, very much looking forward to winter when it won’t involve quite so much sleep deprivation.