Colourful Fountains

Sometimes when out shooting I’ll go on enough of a tangent that the resulting images just don’t fit in with the rest of the post I’ve written, or they’ll prove too much of a distraction from the main content. When this happens, sometimes I’ll hold back those photographs, and give them a post of their own instead of bogging down the flow of the post they were originally intended for.

This is one such post. Whilst out shooting the London night time, Catherine and I came across some fountains near City Hall lit up from underneath. In that post, I only included the one wide shot of the fountains, but I actually spent a bit of time with them, playing about with capturing the water and light playing together in harmony.

I discovered that the fountains (which were mercifully set on ‘low’ and only squirting a foot or so in the air), when photographed from right above, were lit in such a way to resemble fireworks. I loved how they looked, and so I ran with it, snapping quite a few shots of them.

The light transitioned through a number of colours. For some of the images I swapped out to my big aperture lens. Sometimes the colours worked to make the water look less like a firework and more astrological, like a nebula.

I’m actually pretty pleased with how these turned out. I don’t do this sort of abstract imagery very often, and I don’t think I’ve pulled it off so well before. Check out the gallery below for the full assortment.

Catherine also spent some time with the fountains; the one shot she shared on Flickr is both amazing and staggeringly different from what I achieved: rather than the fireworks and nebula that my images resemble, her shot looks like ectoplasm.