apolloflux

Photoset - Sophia In London (Part 2)

Added 2024-10-13 11:14:52 +0000 UTC

As promised, here is part 2 from the shoot I did in London with Sophia a while back.

I have been asked if I can occasionally explain how I went about setting up and preparing for my shoots, so I thought his one would be a good place to start. It is getting harder and harder to find places in London to shoot. The South Bank is tough because 9/10 times you will get spotted on CCTV and a security guy will come and ask you to leave. Sounds crazy, but it happens all the time. I've heard of photographers being asked to move on from Hyde Park, Regents Park and even Richmond Park, despite it being huge!

The Barbican Estate seems to be one of the few remaining places where shoots can take place without hassle from security guards, but in my opinion it is very overused. In feel rarely a day goes by without me seeing another Barbican shoot on Instagram. The same goes for Brick Lane and Shoreditch (despite them being two of my favourite places in London). So I wanted to find somewhere that had an urban vibe, but was not going to be very busy.

With this in mind I spent several hours looking through urban landscape photographer accounts on Instagram, and then tried to find the locations they had shot using Google Streetview. Once I had a list, back in April my wife and I spent a couple of hours walking along the Thames from the O2, all the way to the Woolwich ferry. I had identified a few spots along this route that I wanted to scout out, some of which turned out to be no use. But along our journey we also stumbled across the road where I took these images. It had old, abandoned warehouse buildings on either side (although I imagine it won't be long before the gentrification that has swept across similar areas in London will hit here), and was very quiet.

So this street, along with the Woolwich foot tunnel and a small children's climbing frame area became top of my list for this London shoot with Sophia. I'm hoping to take another model back there soon as I reckon I could use this location several more times before it starts to appear too much on my portfolio.