Prints of London and my Big Ben collection.

Big Ben is the nickname for the Great Bell of the Great Clock of Westminster. I’ve been photographing Big Ben for years and I’ve used it as a backdrop for many of my London prints, I’ve photographed light streaks in front of it, photographed it in the snow, at sunset and at sunrise, I’ve used an SLR, a DSLR and a large medium format camera on a tripod. I’ve made huge panoramics of it and I’ve made small black and white sets of it running up stairs and in corridors. Big Ben is a photographers dream and it features heavily in my galleries of London prints.

It’s a panoramic shape Big Ben with the Houses of parliament off to the left. It’s also a portrait with Westminster bridge in the foreground. It’s landscape shape too. The panoramic print above I shot with a polariser to bring out the blue sky. You can see this panoramic here.

The portrait on the left of Big Ben in the snow I took as part of a series of snowy prints. It was taken on my medium format camera using black and white film. I use Beg Ben a lot as a backdrop but in the case of the print on the right it’s the subject and the London Eye is the backdrop. It’s a lovely sharp image taken on a tripod at a 60th of a second to create a little movement blur on the pods behind.

And of course no post on Big Ben would be complete without one of my favourite prints. This one is all over my website. The reason it’s one of my favourites apart from the composition is it took me so long to get right. I think it took me three evenings to not only get the ambient light the way I wanted but the combination of bus and traffic and the shutter open for just the right amount of time to get the bur. You can see the print here.