Up, Up And Away
These stairs at Southbank are normally crowded, at any time of day. But when I took this shot, about six weeks ago, the area was unusually deserted. I waited for a couple of office workers to walk through the area before shooting this frame.
There is so much symmetry in this scene, yet so much of it is asymmetrical as well. The first five steps are curved, while the next flight of stairs is straight. The railings embrace three different orientations - straight at the top, angled in the middle section and curved at the bottom.
Even when you look at the tiles and the grouting between them, the parallax factor endows the scene with a certain perspective that is normally impossible to achieve in a field of vision that is only about five or six metres long.
The colours are so strong and so vibrant in what can be "seen" in the shot. Yet it is the unseen elements in this frame that provide such an intriguing reflection of soft, pastel shades in the tiles themselves. The silvery-blue streak is actually the sky, reflected through the glass atrium high above where I was standing.
It's a bit like life - you see so much more when you study it carefully.