This image was taken while on an early afternoon walkabout during a visit to London in October 2019.

I was struck by the bold colors and geometric pattern of this polychrome sheet metal facade on a municipal administration building in Camden Town and stopped to study it more closely for a spot and angle that I felt would best capture what I saw in my mind’s eye.

The weather that day was overcast with low clouds, and it had been intermittently rainy, with another shower just beginning. Standing on a sidewalk out in the open, my wife urged me to hurry so we could duck into a pub we had spied a block or two away and escape being drenched.

Caught between my desire to capture the image and my unwillingness to get wetter than I already was, I had enough time to squeeze off three shots before we hurried off. I had a couple of 64bg memory cards for my camera, so every evening back at our apartment, I would download the day’s shots onto my laptop, take a quick look to ensure the files had copied successfully, and rate each image before erasing the cards to start over the following day. As it turned out, the first two were somewhat blurry, but the last capture came the closest to being the most faithful to my original vision.

After returning home several weeks later, I began post-processing the selected images. During that process and after making minor edits to light, color, and geometry, I decided this image would work best cropped as a square. I tried several different crops but felt the image worked best when it included the tiny black triangle in the upper right corner to break up the vertical lines and stripes while providing visual interest. After revisiting the image just this year, I was unable to improve upon the decisions I made during the original post-processing.

What are the TWO most impactful features that make your image a good photograph? Don’t be shy!

Bold colors and stark geometric composition.

If you could make this photo again, what would be the ONE thing you would like to do better or different?

Capture that shadow of a passerby or nearby tree across the facade to add an organic element.

Kent Lufkin shared this photograph in the FRAMES Facebook Group.

Photographer

Kent Lufkin, Redmond, Washington, USA

Equipment and settings

Canon 5D Mark III, Canon 24-105mm ƒ4 IS USM L kit lens.
Shot at 70mm, ƒ8.0, 1/500 sec, ISO 100.