Photos

Whenever photographing a famous sight that you know a million other people have photographed – like St Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow’s Red Square – the challenge is always “How do I make my photograph different from all the others?” Unless you are lucky enough to capture it against a spectacular sky, like a storm, sunrise or sunset, usually the way to do it is to find something of interest in the foreground, and compose the picture around that. When I visited the Red Square last year, I could find nothing in the square that I could incorporate into the foreground. I was about to give up, but then my luck changed and a bridal party showed up to take photographs against the backdrop of St Basil’s, and I was able to compose my shot incorporating the bride and groom releasing a dove into the air. I actually didn’t realise that they were going to release a dove until too late; otherwise I would have switched my camera to continuous shooting mode and captured the dove in a better position in the sky. The bridal party was much bigger than this, and off to the right of the picture were many dark suited men, all with a glass of beer in their right hand and a cigarette in the left hand. The composition looked too cluttered with them all in, so I cropped them out except just one. The three young men on the left are just bystanders and not part of the bridal party, but the orange coat adds a nice splash of colour to that part of the picture. I also tried a version cropping harder on the left, but I didn’t like that because it left the cathedral too much towards the corner of the picture and made the square look much smaller than it really is. Focal length was 28 mm.