In February of 2012 I had the chance to visit England for work-related things. Towards the end of the week I took a day to explore London a bit on my own with my camera. While there I found myself at Westminster Cathedral trying to make some beautiful photos.
It turns out that for a small donation the folks in the gift shop will take you up in an old elevator to the top of the tower. (The bottom of the tower can be seen to the left in my photo of the front of the cathedral.) It was rather cold that day and I think the people from the shop thought I was a little crazy to be going up to the cold windy tower. But then again, anyone lugging a full-sized DSLR around is probably at least a little crazy.
Besides the still photos, I also did some playing around with a panorama app on my smartphone. These panoramas had proved to be kind of fun for me, so I did one out of each of the four windows of the tower. It would have been really cool to have a full 360-degree panorama from the tower, but since I was shooting from inside the tower we’ll just have to use our imagination.
Many of my still photos from the trip can be found my England 2012 gallery. There are lots of pictures, including time in Harrogate, York, Fountains Abbey, Reading, and London. There are also a few panoramas that I saved as flat images in the gallery, and even a couple on which I attempted a perspective correction to make it look a little more normal. Perhaps I’ll blog about those in a future post. For today, here are the four views out the tower windows at Westminster Cathedral.
Click on the images below to start each panorama. Once they load, I recommend using the full-screen button to view them large and then use the mouse to drag your way around each composite. Enjoy!
One:
Two:
Three:
Four: