Trafalgar Square

I've been late in posting these entries, as I fell ill a few days after our return from London. I now propose photos from our Trafalgar square outing, from the 11th of October (2018). 

This was our fourth outing, after Nunhead cemetry, St James Park, the V&A. Each of these yielded some photos and a lot of memories, which aren't necessarily immortalised in files, and that's okay. 


My first stop was at Waterstones book shop, on the corner of Trafalgar square/ Strand. 

I'd misunderstood a friend who suggested bookshops, as I thought it was a second hand one, and not a regular full-priced bookshop. So, I didn't buy anything, but looked at everything. 

I love that in the UK, Harry Potter overtakes everthing, such as this. Out of the field of view, there was a table with a lot more merch, but I would have needed another photo (didn't think to shoot it on my way out) or a very wide angle. 

This and next photo were taken with my phone, Cubot X18. 

I also loved that this and other book shops I visited had these reccomendations right under them. I wish I'd photographed the one under Lord of the Rings, in which, basically, it was said that if you don't believe the hype, believe him, because he's a book seller and have read it. I never seen anything of this kind in France. 

Now, I make a parenthesis with the 5 photos I took of the square and its statues, using the Kodak as in my previous posts. These required extensive editing with Gimp, as it was a dreary cloudy day, and white balance was an issue on the Kodak's automatic mode. 

I didn't expect my phone to manage these conditions better, but it did. The Sony censor in its 16 MP rear camera really made the difference and despite my higher difficulties in holding a phone in comparison to a point & shoot (and in turn, to a bridge camera), I got much higher quality images, which required no or little editing in Gimp.

For instance, I didn't alter anything in this image, used for this blog's entry. Everything in it came naturally vibrant and well exposed, in my opinion. 

I only slightly edited this next photo, with a bit more contrast and saturation. You can see more of the National gallery on the back - that elongated domed building.

The National gallery, and the lion statue that you saw in my Kodak shots. Here, I edited contrast, saturation and exposure, and ever so slightly shadows/highlights. 

This lion was a challenge to photograph. It's fenced some meters away ; there were quite a few people between us, so I had to wait and zoom a bit. I edited the shadows and highlights, white balance. I couldn't show the mouth better, but I like that it poses menacing and the partially unseen mouth adds an effect. 

Here I only added some highlight, which showcases the sun beaming on the spire. I also reduced the spire's shadows very slightly to exacerbate this effect. White balance was treated by a very small edit using Gimp's curves tool. 

Sometimes, gear can confused us, can't it ? my phone surprised me, and I surprised me, because I thought my shaking hand, struggling to grasp the phone a lot more than it already did with the  point & shoot wouldn't yield nice results at all. I wa sproven wrong.

This wasn't the end of our Trafalgar outing. We then visited the National gallery, in which I took a handfull photos and which I'll propose in my next entry - before I post my Oxford photos.