In 2024, UK financial and professional services produced £307bn in economic output, 12% of the entire economic output of the UK. Around three quarters of a million people work in financial services of one kind or another in London, a lot of them in the buildings you can see here.

I took this photo from just across the Thames near the Globe Theatre and the Tate Modern.

A few days ago I was at the Queen’s House, at Greenwich – further south and up on a hill.

The Queen’s House, as I mentioned in a post about is a 17th-century villa, designed by Inigo Jones.

It’s called the Queen’s House because it was commissioned by Queen Anne of Denmark but she died before it was completed. Charles I then gave the house to his wife Henrietta Maria as a royal house to enjoy herself.

It is free to enter and is basically an art gallery.

Here is the view back across the Thames. The buildings of modern London remind me of the Manhattan skyline.

And a lot of building continued during Covid. I wondered at the time whether construction workers had higher rates of infection.

I don’t know who the people in the photo are, I was interested in the view across the river.

How Sharp Is The Fuji X-T50 and 55-200mm lens combination? Cameras are so good now that pretty much any brand would be sufficiently good. Still, Fuji have cut themselves a nice slice of the market because of the colours they produce.

The EXIF data (the information about shutter speed, aperture, and ISO) that the camera records along with the photo is useful to look at sometimes.

For this shot, the EXIF says I shot this at 1/150th of a second at f5.6 and ISO 400.

And it says that the focal length was zoomed to 156.1 mm, which is equivalent to a 234mm focal length in 35mm full frame.

The base ISO of the camera is 125, so the colour and contrast would be a tad more bright and contrasty if I had shot at ISO 125. A bit of sun would have increased colour and contrast as well, but it was a dull day.

So this isn’t the absolute best colour and contrast the camera and lens combination is capable of. But it was my first outing with the lens and I am pleasantly surprised at the results.

I know I shot it hand held because I haven’t used my tripod in months.

And a shutter speed of 1/150th of a second is fast enough to mean no blur caused by camera shake.

Camera shake means where the photographer can’t keep the camera steady long enough for the shutter to fire.

Still, the Fuji has in-body image stabilisation, and the lens has image stabilisation as well, so I could probably have shot at a much slower speed and got a shake-free photo.

For sure I didn’t spend a lot of time composing and taking the shot. I saw the flower on a walk around Regents Park. It appealed and I took the shot and moved on. So maybe at base ISO and more time spent, the shot could be even sharper.

And when I look at the photo I see that it is the leaf to the right of the flower head that is in the absolute plane of focus. And the outer petals at bottom right of the flower head are in that plane. The petals in the middle of the flower are outside that plane of focus.

So it looks like I was a bit casual about focusing and that this part of the image is sharper.

Plainly though I aimed at the middle of the flower, which you can see because these two images are crops, and below is the full frame and the flower head is in the middle of the frame.

Now, is it a dahlia or a chrysanthemum? Chrysanthemum leaves are duller, thinner and moredelicate, and the leaves are divided into several rounded lobes.

Dahlia leaves are glossy, and oval with pointed tips and serrated edges, so that makes this a dahlia.

I saw the Chevrolet Corvette again and this time I happened to have my Fuji X-T50 set with JPEGs to Acros film simulation.

I maybe should explain that I have the camera set to take a RAW image and a JPEG. The camera has a dial on the top plate and when you rotate it, it sets what film simulation it will use for the JPEG.

I had the dial set to Acros, which is a black and white film simulation. I wanted some colour in the JPEG so I moved the dial and the next simulation on the dial was Nostalgic Neg. And it just seemed to fit for this image, which is a JPEG is straight out of the camera.

And here’s what the dial on the top plate looks like.