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Striking images of London's landmarks cast in eerie gothic glow

Tom Parsons
Tom Parsons

These striking images show London's landmarks cast in an eerie gothic glow.

Tom Parsons, an imaging student at Cardiff University, has developed a huge following on social media for his dark pictures of the capital.

One particularly striking image shows London’s Big Ben standing tall against a grey skyline and startling orange sunset.

Another, which has been ‘liked’ thousands of times on his Instagram page, depicts The Shard protruding into the fiery red sky.

Parliament (Tom Parsons)
Parliament (Tom Parsons)

The 19-year-old, originally from Blaenau Gwent, South Wales, said he began using the “dark and moody” style of editing in the first place because he was trying to distinguish himself as a photographer.

“I have always found it difficult to stand out from other photographers as it is very competitive - especially on social media," he said.

“But as I started to get in to platforms like Instagram, I come across different feature pages which would share your photos with credit in order to gain that artist more followers.

The Shard (Tom Parsons)
The Shard (Tom Parsons)

“This is where the look started to develop, as I would find that there would be ‘moody’ feature accounts, that didn’t have many actual moody images on. At this point I decided I would try and fill that gap.

“Ever since I have been trying to push my images as dark and moody as possible, still learning new techniques and possibilities along the way.”

Mr Parsons’s distinct look has already garnered him more than 11,500 followers on Instagram.

Tower Bridge (Tom Parsons)
Tower Bridge (Tom Parsons)

He said that, in order to create each shot, he takes multiple photos from different angles with different exposures.

“For example I will take a photo exposing for the ground, one exposing for the subject of the photo and also one for the sky,” he said.

He then uses photo editing tool Photoshop Raw to touch up each one individually before merging them together to create the final image.

The City
The City

“The final thing I will do is take the image into Adobe Lightroom to do a final edit,” he said.

“At this stage I will increase the details of the image, crush the shadows and highlights, add a strong vignette and overall give it a dark and moody look.”

Despite being based in Wales for his studies, Mr Parsons has spent a lot of time photographing London.

“I like having the challenge of taking iconic landmarks and trying to make them look unique, something no Londoner has or will see unless looking at my images,” he said.

“I do not plan on only photographing London in the future, as I want to travel to more countries and other famous landmarks. But London is easy for me to travel to and also a very beautiful city to take photos of.”

The student said he is “always so critical” of his work but added that his favourite London picture was “the reflection photo I took of tower bridge, looking down The Rill towards city hall” – which he shared with followers on his nineteenth birthday.

He said: “The original photo was much different to the final shot, but the reason I like to so much is because I think that’s the one photo on my feed that really changed the way I edit and photographed.

“I try to make my images as visually pleasing as possible, and sometimes that can be an image straight out of camera with small edits, or a huge composite of multiple photos within Photoshop”

To see more of his stunning photos, follow tomzzlee on Instagram.