Wherever you go in London you can almost guarantee that a crane – indicating a building site – will form part of the view. Change and development are part of the capital’s everyday life.
Southbank is no exception. Walking along from the National Theatre to Tate Modern recently I took a slight detour to check out a new development and was faced by the concrete skeleton of a new development. The site was silent and empty except for one man, in red.
I waited patiently, hoping he would move to a more compositionally ‘correct ‘ position in the frame, but after five minutes or so it was clear he wasn’t going to be moving on any time soon. He stayed Dead Centre, and so I thought – man in red is the picture, de-saturate everything else (not that there was much colour in the first place). And the title was easy – Red Centre.
Remember to click the image for a higher quality enlargement.
LensScaper 
And here I was expecting a photo of the Australian Outback 😉
Love this Andy and I quite like that he’s in the centre. Great shot! 🙂
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Ha! Sadly, never been that far south! Sometimes it’s nice to break the rules. Glad you like it, Norma.
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Love the pattern and lines Andy. The red adds a great contrast to the image and works quite well.
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Thanks Len. Red is the real stand-out colour.
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Fantastic Andy. You really have an amazing eye.
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That’s very kind of you, Edith. I didn’t have far to look to see this!
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Love this image Andy! It’s an abstract with a pop of red! 🙂
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Thanks Rachel. It’s nice to buck all the rules once in a while. And it actually is a very symmetrical image with the red spot right at the centre. It’s fun finding images like this and working out how to get the best out of them.
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Even if the man in red didn’t cooperate the way you wanted him to, it’s still a great shot! (Maybe he knew what he was doing?)
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Thanks Melinda. In situations like this you either shoot what you can, or walk away. I’ll always choose to shoot. The time to bin a shot is later at home after careful consideration on a big screen and even then I prefer to hang on to the failures and re-visit them a month or two later.
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I almost never delete an image. As I learn more about Photoshop, things that were unusable even a year ago are coming into play again. That Dream series I am working on is drawn largely from blurry mistakes.
Storage is getting to be a problem, though, so I might have to change my methods!
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Really nice use of patterns and lines Andy.
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Thanks Steven. The more images I shoot the more I seem to enjoy geometry in one shape or form
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I don’t mind the focal point in the center. Rules were made to be broken. This is proof!
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Absolutely right, Ken. I am proud to say I am a maverick, I enjoy breaking the rules
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I actually think that keeping the red splash in the centre works better here. I did a quick masking with sheets of paper to place him on each of the four power points but found that the composition just did not work as well.
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Interesting comments, Mark. Thank you. I tried cropping the image too but then the verticals were all messed up (and it looked all wrong). The Rule of Thirds just does not work for every image.
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Really funny, but when I saw your title “Red Centre” in the link back on another blog where you’d commented, I imagined it was referring to the centre of Australia and Ayers Rock/Uluru! This has turned out to be a pleasant surprise, then. A great idea for a shot, and having that red in the centre works well, in my opinion. All the best…
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Hi Andrew – thanks for commenting. You’re the second Australian to think I was referring to the Australian outback!
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great catch!
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Thanks Jim, Glad you like it.
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What a nice work in composing the shot! Great work!
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Thanks very much for your comment, Alex
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You are welcome! Do drop by my blog too!
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I have done, and am signed up!
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Thank you! Cheers!
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