example22

All day, it's been pouring with rain, reducing the view to fuzzy shapes and grey outlines. Suddenly, at sunset, the rain stopped, the view returned and there was the weirdest lighting effect. Every single building somehow ultra-real, in pin-sharp focus. Overhead, heavy unbroken slate-grey clouds. On the horizon, a long line of puffy, billowing clouds, starting out small on the right in Westminster, growing bigger towards the left as they moved behind St Paul's, and all of them lit sodium-lamp yellow by the setting sun (out of sight, over my right shoulder). It looked, I swear to god, exactly as though Parliament was on fire. And, for the finishing touch, there was even a vertical chunk of rainbow rising out of the Barbican on the left.

I don't know why I'm telling you this. Probably because I felt I should record it somehow, but failed miserably to get it on film (auto-exposure and auto-white-balance are not good for this sort of thing, and there's only so much horizon will fit in the frame).