Trust Your (Photographic) Gut Feelings

Since I returned from beautiful Georgia (the country), the weather in London had been pretty grim and depressing. It rained almost every day and it was generally cold and grey most of the time.

This day was no exception, and frankly there was nothing that could hint to what happened later in the afternoon. I spent most of the day reviewing and editing photos as there was no point in going out and shoot.

Grey sky, uninteresting light, I was again foreseeing a no-shooting day.

All of a sudden, I see a different light coming through the window. A slightly warmer light as if the sun had tried to breach the clouds somehow.

My work room faces North, so this time of the year I was able to see in the direction of the sunset, and indeed there was a tiny opening in the grey wall.

Now, this quite often ends up nowhere: The clouds take over again or the sky doesn’t receive any colour whatsoever. It's surely the more common outcome.

But since my return, I didn’t have stimuli to go back in the street to shoot, so I badly needed an excuse to take my camera outside.

There was very little apparent chance that the sunset could be nice at all, but I somehow felt it differently. Also, I missed a few good ones in the recent past out of mere lack of trust in my gut feelings… But this time I put all my gear in my back and rushed to the nearest vantage point.

I decided I’d rather take a few dull panoramic shot (or capture some dramatic clouds, should they turn stormy) than regret to miss a nice sunset.

Having read until now, you know where this is going…

And so I rushed to my nearest vantage point, which happened to be the Shard skyscraper with its ever-annoying glass reflections and no-tripod policy. Arrived and fought my way to a good spot.

The rest is captured in my pictures:

I posted this last image in my Instagram Stories and it ended up having quite a good response, with a few accounts reposting it. Thanks guys!

By the way, why don't you come have a peek and maybe follow me? My Instagram is @fabienb.

What really surprised me here is how clear the view was from up the Shard: to the West you could see miles beyond Wembley, which is already far away from this skyscraper. And yet some of my friends posted pictures of this sunset from the ground and it still looked pretty cloudy.

Different points of view can produce very diverse images!

Even up there, this is what it looked like to the East at the same moment.

Bottom line: Take your camera and go out shooting.

Particularly if your instinct tells you to.