Night time cityscapes at the Birmingham Bullring and City Hall

Light trails outside Selfridges at the Birmingham Bullring - Image (c) Nick Tsiatinis Photography. STRICTLY NO USE WITHOUT PERMISSION.

Light trails outside Selfridges at the Birmingham Bullring

On Wednesday, me and a couple of talented photographer friends (the excellent Justin Thompson and superb Mark Huddlestone) ventured into Birmingham to shoot some night-time cityscapes. For me, it was a chance to put some of the techniques I had learned at the ‘One Hour Photo’ shoot I had done with Lee Frost for Digital SLR Photography magazine back into practice – and it was a great excuse to get back out with the camera and photograph something a little different!

The photograph above was taken outside the famous Selfridges building at the Bullring. After taking a few shots from ground level I decided I needed a slightly different perspective for my photograph. We saw a multi storey car park opposite, so we checked with the security guard that we could go up there for a few photographs, then went to the open air deck for the best vantage point.

Positioning my camera rather precariously on the top of the wall of the car park I used my Canon 17-40mm f4L lens at its widest setting to get as much of the scene and roads in as possible, set my camera to a 30 second exposure at a fairly small aperture, held tightly on to the strap and took the shot!

Of course, no trip to Birmingham is complete without photographing the side of the Selfridges building at close quarters – and we certainly didn’t want to miss out on this particular cliche!

Bullring Selfridges at night including some stars!

The side of the Selfridges building at the Bullring – pointing the way to the stars!

Again, a 30 second long exposure was used to build up the colours on the side of the building – and because of the length of time taken to take the shot it also had the interesting and completely desired side effect of capturing the stars in the clear night sky! If you can’t quite see them in the image above then click the photo to make it bigger!

We were having fun, but it was a ‘school night’ and time was rapidly running away from us – so we stopped off quickly at the Birmingham City Hall to get a quick photograph of the hall itself and the fountains outside.

Birmingham City Hall and Fountains

The City Hall and Fountains at Birmingham City Centre

So at 11:30pm we made our way back to the car and left Birmingham, a few photographs in the bag and a very enjoyable evening had by all!