Helen Stephenson's 2006 Thames Festival Pictures

My main objective in going to the Thames Festival was to see the fireworks, which were fired from a barge moored on the Thames between Blackfriars Bridge and Waterloo Bridge, but we hoped to take in some of the Night Carnival as well. In the event, the crowds along the route of the Night Carnival meant that we were too late to get a good view, so we decided to find ourselves a pitch for watching the fireworks before all the good places got crowded.

With that aim in mind, we crossed Blackfriars Bridge, where we'd started out, and went down onto the South Bank.

Our meanderings in the general direction of good fireworks viewing took us past this large installation built by local children. The lights you can see behind the lady are the lights hanging in nearby trees. The picture reminds me somewhat of the "Queen of the night" scene in the film Amadaeus.

Just alongside the lady, a band had set up and started playing just as we got there. I thought that they were pretty good, so we stayed to listen for a while. I thought about some hand-held prime lens photography, but decided that the light levels weren't really up to it, so I found a spot for my tripod, set my 28-300mm lens to f5.6 and my sensitivity to ISO 1600 and had a go at some gig photography like that.

I liked the saxophone player a lot, and just generally found him photogenic, so here he is rather a lot of times!

I did also catch some of his colleagues in the band on my CCD, so here they are.

Then it was time to move on in search of the perfect spot for viewing the fireworks and staking our claim to it before the crowds arrived!

We passed by various outdoor market stalls, including a number of booksellers. Here is a picture of some of the market stalls, taken from the vantage point of Waterloo Bridge. It turned out much better with auto white balance than when I tried to compensate for the lighting because my camera seems to handle tungsten white balance by discarding a lot of red and green detail and the people milling around outside the stall rather disappeared into the foreground!

After some to-ing and fro-ing, I decided that Waterloo Bridge was the place to be and we went up there to find a spot before the crowds arrived to take all the front places. That meant that we got there well before the fireworks were due to be let off and I had plenty of time to photograph the view. Here's the view towards the City of London, taken using auto white balance, hence the brown sky and water.

The bridge with the red and white arches is Blackfriars Bridge and the major buildings on the skyline are St Paul's Cathedral, distinctive because of its dome; Tower 42, the tallest building in The City of London (although not as tall as some buildings in Docklands) and the Swiss Re Building, also known as The Gherkin or even The Erotic Gherkin because of its shape. The tall building under construction near the right is the new Willis Building, which is just across the street from the Lloyd's Building. The rounded-top building in front of the Willis Building is part of the building on the corner of Gracechurch Street and Lombard Street which was occupied by Barclays Bank until recently. It's currently under refurbishment.

I zoomed in for a closer look at St Paul's Cathedral, Tower 42 and also the Oxo Tower, which is on the South Bank not far from Blackfriars Bridge. Some people might recognise Tower 42 as the Nat West Tower, however Nat West had to vacate it when the IRA bombed it some years ago and they never moved back in again when the building was declared safe, so the name had to change.

I pointed my camera a little closer to my vantage point, where I snapped St Katharine, whose decks were full of fireworks spectators, and the building behind her on the Victoria Embankment.

I zoomed my lens in for some more shots towards the City of London, but this time I used a tungsten white balance, and so avoided the brown sky I had in my earlier picture. I like the boat trails in the picture on the left, particularly the zig-zag one!

I had a picture of Blackfriars Bridge then. The pink and purple advancing along the bridge is part of the Night Carnival, but as this was a 10-second exposure, you can't pick out the individual figures, just the haze of their lights advancing.

Then it was time to put a fresh set of batteries in the camera and set the controls up for fireworks. Unfortunately, I'd forgotten that Waterloo Bridge was further from the fireworks than the vantage points I've used for other fireworks displays and I quickly discovered when the fireworks started going off that the 10-20mm super wide angle lens was the wrong choice and I had to swap it for the 28-300mm lens.

I had a number of disappointing results for another reason: my backgrounds weren't properly in focus. I suspect that this was because two people went over the crowd control barrier and got in front of my tripod and I think one of them may have leant on my tripod leg. Possibly someone leant on one of the legs behind the barrier too. Anyway, my fireworks trails looked all right, but the backgrounds in a number of shots didn't.

Between the crop tool and the unsharp mask tool in PhotoShop, I've managed to rescue some results which I'm prepared to show people, and they're below.

When the last firework had gone off, Stephen noticed how St Paul's was almost enshrouded in smoke, so here's one final picture of St Paul's before the smoke cleared away.