Ahhhh... the Tower of London, I love it for the history, I love it for the location. Visiting it should be done at least once in a lifetime, but not more. First it is pricey, and I'm a little cheap, second, you have to buy tickets quite a ways ahead of time and choose the time you go then, so flexibility is out. All that said it IS a cool building with amazing history and the tour with the warders is quite a good time. This brother was our guide.

This guy just had an epic beard/stasche and gave me the look.

These ravens are cool, here is their story:https://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/whats-on/the-ravens/#gs.lg6hfd
  

Seems that everything has to be ornate, I mean... its a weathervane mate.

From a photographers standpoint, the interior was quite dark and I was back to High ISO and wide open apertures to get photos. Don't think the wooden horses minded though.

Different from stained glass (Which I love as you will see later on) these painted panes of glass can still be beautiful. Amazing how these things have lasted through the centuries.

 This view shows a little bit of the history of the Tower as a fortress. To make things more difficult, the builders of castles tended to make the ground floor pretty solid and put the entrance 1 story up and made the attackers have to go up stairs then make a right turn to even begin to attack. If you are right handed and in armor that can be tough. Especially if they rig the stairs to collapse as you are about to politely attempt to give a neighborly hello with your sword.  

The Tower Bridge is really best viewed from right on the waterfront by the tower, sadly you cannot get to this spot at night I found out.  

Back to my favorite genre of night time long exposures, these photos were taken a few nights before the photos above, but I decided to clump stuff by Subject/Location as much as day they were taken on.

Getting up close and personal yielded a very different look, silly me I had a vision of standing in the middle somehow but that isn't possible, no island in the middle to climb and standing in the middle of the crosswalk would likely be frowned upon. So you get what you can get. The distortion of the wide angle and looking up is fun though. In case you were wondering the green lights just below the arch are a result of internal reflections inside the lens (The Pentax 15-30) I could have edited them out easily, but I kinda like them. The same concept apply as in the last post, tripod and cable or IR release and imagination make this kind of stuff easy to do.

Jumping ahead to the last night in London, I took a left from the Millennium Bridge by the Globe Theater to walk down closer to the Tower Bridge. The Thames was cooperative and the movement of the water and some boats were quite to my liking.  

 I think the movement of the boats was the best in this one. But they were all good! 

Thanks for reading this far. Hope you enjoyed the show.