Walking through the West End -

Today I had to take a series of 360 degree panoramas around Paddington for a client, and boy was the security badgers-arse tight around the station!

Each panorama needs around 16 photos to be taken from the same spot, and I felt very conspicuous swivelling around holding a chunky Sony717 camera, so I decided to use my super-compact and ultra discrete Sony F77DX instead.

I had to photograph a route from Paddington station to Edgware Road and it was a nightmare trying to capture a scene at the busy junction between Praed Street and Edgware Road.

When you’re creating a panorama, you need to avoid photographing moving objects as they make it really hard to create a seamless ‘stitch’ (so if a street is full of rapidly moving cars it’s going to be impossible to get the two ‘ends’ of a panorama to match up).

I had to spend ages lurking on a traffic island looking for a break in the traffic (looking very suspicious in the process) and I’m not sure if I was successful in capturing this last panorama, but I’ll be going through all the photos tomorrow – all 200 of them!

Tech note: the panoramas are stitched together using iseemedia software. You can see hundreds of my panoramas here.

I fancied a walk afterwards, so I trekked all the way from Paddington to Leicester Square – and what a lovely walk it was too!

Living in grimy south London it’s easy to think the entire city must be covered in graffiti, but I barely saw a single tag during my entire walk – just street after street of well preserved Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian houses and bijou mews.

Walking through London rules….