England & Ireland, 2017. Revisited. Part 1: London

In the spring of 2017, my wife and I spent fourteen days moving through England and Ireland: London, Oxford, Liverpool, Dublin, two long bus days across the Irish countryside, and a castle at the very end.

I shot about 2,200 frames on that trip, and for nine years they sat in a folder. This fall I went back through them, narrowed them down, and re-edited everything in a film style I've been experimenting with. My editing back then looked nothing like this.

Going frame by frame, I kept trying to remember what I was thinking when I pressed the shutter. Some of it came back. Some of it didn't. This is the trip as the photos remember it.

London

We based ourselves at an Airbnb in Belgravia, and the first frames on the card are the quiet white terraces around it, shot the afternoon we arrived. That evening we walked to Hyde Park Corner and down to Buckingham Palace, and caught the Victoria Memorial at blue hour with the London Eye lit up in the distance.

The next morning started with a cookie shot from Dominique Ansel around the corner, then a full day at the Warner Bros. Studio Tour.

Day three was Kensington Palace and the Diana fashion exhibition, then King's Cross and St Pancras, then Westminster. Walking past the Abbey, I stumbled onto One Great George Street, home of the Institution of Civil Engineers. As a civil engineer, I wasn't walking past that without a photo. We finished in St James's Park, then at Her Majesty's Theatre for The Phantom of the Opera, the first time either of us had seen it.