Bus Passes

Last week I was walking along Oxford Street in London’s West End when I came across a very modern and unusual glass façade. Cue an image. Classic London buses were continually passing by and provided a strong visual contrast to this façade.

This is the image I captured first. I was attracted by the slogan on the bus.

My mistake – I cropped too tight when I shot the image and left myself a difficult image to align correctly with the slogan creeping off the edge of the image. I’m a bit of a stickler for correcting leaning verticals and sloping horizontal lines. I did the best I could, but I felt the image was shoe-horned a bit too tight.

So I cropped it tighter still back home! That may sound weird but it allowed me to get all the lines straight (avoiding the rather oddly sloping lettering in the right corner of the first image). And it seemed to add tension to the image, emphasizing the two elements of the composition.

Meanwhile back in London, realizing my poor cropping, I hung around for another 15 mins waiting for another bus with the same slogan on it to pass by. It never happened. All the buses were different. I had widened the lens and in desperation shot the third image.

Different slogan but I liked the flow of it, despite the slope, and certainly the image had more ‘space’.  There was even a face at one of the windows of the bus.

But which one works best? It’s time for your input please. Which one do you think is the best visually and compositionally, or conveys a message?

Do comment and let me know your opinion.

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