Liverpool architecture
It's about my Liverpool Photo Walk.
Now we'll travel into Liverpool city centre to our starting point. The standard Photo Walk starts at 10:30am or 2pm
It lasts 3 hours. We'll walk over to Saint George's Hall. In mid- 2021, there were works to improve the street layout throughout the city centre, so apologies for the power saws and warning beeps in the background. We'll go up to the top of the steps, between the columns, where the walk begins.
So this is where we do the first part of the photo walk, which is the theory part, this is kinda like my classroom here. There’s a bit of cover if there is rainy weather and we look at some of the features on the camera and learn a little bit about the theory of photography. And then we go on to continue and put those things into practice. We look at the features on the camera including ISO, shutter speed and aperture. We'll look at the different modes: Manual, aperture priority, shutter priority and program auto and I'll explain why program auto is the best general-purpose mode. St George's Hall has many magnificent architectural features that we can use for test shots. If we walk to the end of the colonnade we can look back and see it from the opposite angle. I think the blue almost looks like the sea.
Saint George's Hall is said to be one of the best neoclassical buildings in Europe. To photograph it from close-up though, you do require a wide angle lens. In front of Saint George's Hall is the Liverpool Cenotaph, designed by Lionel Budden, with bronze sculptures by Herbert Tyson Smith. On this side, the relatives of the fallen heroes are represented in a frieze. It was unveiled in 1930. On the other side are the soldiers marching off to war. I'll talk about how to get the best exposure with a dark coloured subject. The friezes on the exterior of St George's Hall were designed Thomas Stirling Lee and appeared in the late nineteeth century.
Here we look at how to photograph artworks, making sure that the lines are straight, very important for artists who use social media. It’s not easy and a little bit of Photoshop might be required, as here. The wide angle lens really emphasises the grandeur of the architecture. Saint George's Hall looks like an ancient Greek temple with a view over the Aegean Sea. In reality, the view is over Lime Street, Radio City tower and Queen Square bus station. The architect of St George's Hall was Harvey Lonsdale Elmes and it was opened in 1854. We move on to the Steble Fountain, which unfortunately has not been working for several years. We used to practice slow shutter speeds by photographing the streams of water, but we’ll just have to wait.
This is the Walker Art Gallery, which offers some great indoor photo opportunities as we'll see. Here, we practice blurring the background using Aperture Priority. There's plenty of interesting architecture and I'll tell you about how to get verticals straight in the camera.
We walk down past the ornate lamp
Posts, with st george's hall on the left and we enter the walker art gallery.
Inside the sculpture hall, there are more great photo opportunities. These models strike some great poses and never get tired or stroppy! Now we walk down to the Central Library and inside we look up into the futuristic atrium with its wood-framed glass dome at the top. We take the escalator to the Picton Library and its magnificent reading room. Next, we'll go on the lift up to the roof terrace, where there is a very good view over the city.
On the on the right hand side, the Liver Building and Municipal Buildings, this photo taken on a previous walk. For the photo walk, you'll need a zoom lens, so bring all the lenses you've got. The World Museum presents us with another magnificent portico with steps leading up to it. The street is sloping, so careful with those horizontals. We look at principles of composition and I’ll also mention how I get rid of certain elements using Photoshop. We turn about face and enter St John’s Gardens, a haven of tranquility in the heart of the city. There there are more memorials, this one for child victims of road crashes. There are flowers, lawns, bushes, trees, it's an attractive place.
Saint John's Church stood here until. We walk down to the roundabout by the tunnel and we'll practice slow shutter speeds and how to track moving vehicles. Here are some of my attempts, which improved each time. Yours will too. And our final subject, the Hillsborough Monument Memorial by Tom Murphy. Actually, you could take hundreds of photographs of this monument, there are so many details, capturing the horror of what happened, the quest for justice and the sadness of those left behind. It's cylindrical, so you can't take it in one one shot but there is one way to get it all in, a walkaround article. So I hope to see you on the photo walk very soon...