Images from the area around Piazza della Repubblica, Milano, Italy.

These were taken on a rather rainy and cloudy day just before the end of December – a fairly typical winter day in Milan. The new concrete, steel and glass buildings seem only to exaggerate the cold inhumane weather at the moment and lack even the minimal colour that exists in the older city areas.

All images were taken using a Canon 5D MkIII with the 70-300mm L. This is a great lens for architecture, particularly on a wet day when it is not practical to use other options. By using a relatively long zoom range, small areas of the architecture can be isolated and if there is sufficient subject distance, the amount of vertical perspective correction applied in post processing is usually quite small – making this a reasonable alternative to the use of a tilt-shift lens for this set. In these examples, some have been corrected for perspective, while others are straight from camera.