No Rush, No Blur – Just London

London is a city where the moment waits, and the moment runs. This city encourages both the deliberate gaze as well as the quick fire which is just another way of saying that London lets you choose your pace. Photography lives in the slow walk of seeing as well as in the quick leap of reacting. It happens in a spontaneous click as well as clicking after giving a thought to the ‘when’ and ‘what’ of a composition. London never stays still and this is what helps a photographer. This city loves those roaming around with DSLRs as well as those who need to pull out their smartphones and fumble with the apps before finally getting into the clicking mode. The patient observer as well as the quick-footed chaser of moments can both browse through their photo gallery at the end of day and mumble: ‘Ah! London, I love you!’

The quick leap of reacting

I remember walking all day long here with my Nikon and three different lenses… a 50mm, one 70-300mm, and the default 18-55mm lens. In the past few visits though I have preferred clicking pictures on my smartphone. Though my Galaxy Note 9 isn’t the best that technology can offer, I am rather pleased with the output.

There have been times when I loved to aim my Nikon from my seat on a double-decker bus and capture a lonesome empty can on the roof of a bus shelter. I have zoomed in on the Millenium Bridge to capture the beauty of chewing gum art that not one of the thousands who go by are even aware of. Waiting at a distance to click ducks and swans or crows and pigeons by zooming in or capturing airplanes as they touchdown or take-off at the City Airport from the other side of the river… the DSLR helps. One can remain undetected while clicking from a distance and this helps if one wishes to get expressions. I got some interesting pictures at Wimbledon. Fleeting moments or those where a sharp image from a distance is needed are those times when a DSLR is useful. Some truths do burn in an instant.

As Garry Winogrand once said: ‘I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.’ Daido Moriyama often captures the raw, grainy blur – the image that feels like a breath stolen. So maybe depth isn’t always found in stillness. Maybe sometimes, it’s in speed. In the untamed. In the barely-caught. But there is another facet in photographing London. It is the slow perspective.

The slow walk of seeing

Photography lives in a slow, relaxed pace as well. This is what David Swainsbury (from photoglory dot art) communicated during a ‘Art in the Dock’ photography workshop. He told us that there is a certain truth in slowness, in the gentle unfolding of a scene, in the deep noticing that comes with still feet and wide eyes. He took us all out of the room, and we walked slowly for around a thousand yards up to the Gallions Reach DLR station. ‘Pause’, he told us and ‘observe’ because sometimes it is only then that the play of light and shadows becomes real. André Kertész tells us that to ‘see is not enough; you have to feel what you photograph.’ And to feel, truly feel, we must move at the speed of presence, not urgency. When you move slowly, you don’t just see, you begin to feel. Distance becomes emotion. Shadows carry memory. David Alan Harvey has written: ‘Don’t shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like.’ That day a lot of us were shooting with our smartphones and even I realised that the distance we walked in around an hour and half that afternoon was a distance we walked nearly every day in under fifteen minutes.

Photographing this part of London as I walked slowly made me feel like a wildlife photographer who anticipated a picture in his mind, observed the terrain to select the composition that defined something and then waited. I was able to get an airplane emerging out of an autumn tree that defined migratory birds. Another airplane with a warning signpost was captured. There was the fleeting step of a runner that one shot got. The eye-shaped window of a pub with another eye enclosing it like a frame seemed like a nice composition that I had not thought of even after walking by the spot hundreds of times. The light and dark lines in another picture were a result of just standing at a spot and looking idly all around. There were reflections captured. There were juxtapositions that gave a picture a new and wider dimension.

I am happy that I was a part of this photography walk conducted by David. I now know that a no rush, no blur London is a camera-friendly truth.
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Arvind Passey
Uploaded on 16 April 2025
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