Inside the White Tower in the Tower of London are 4 sets of spiral staircases like the one featured in my image today. At all four corners of the tower, these stairs wind up & down for three storeys allowing access to the upper floors from above and below. As it turns out, they’re much more than that. The tower was built during the middle ages as a fortress, so in the design of the tower there are a lot of medieval defences.

Notice in the image where the hand rails are. Ascending the stairs, the rail is on the right (in the olden days the rail on the right wasn’t present apparently). Meaning as you go up, your right hand was occupied keeping a hold so you wouldn’t trip, leaving you with only your left hand free to attack with a weapon. In those days, most people were right handed, so this aided in the defence of the keep. Conversely on the way down, the defenders had their left hand to hold with and their right hand to attack with a weapon.

Nikon D700, Nikon 16-35mm f/4, 16mm, f/4, ISO 3200, 5 exposures hand-held

The railing wasn’t the only defence. Notice the variable height of the stairs. This prevents you from getting into a rhythm running up the stairs with any kind of ease. Such simple things yielded rather effective defence, it’s pretty cool!

For this image, I’m standing and leaning back into a little slit window zoomed as far out as I can to capture the spiralling stairs. I couldn’t help but think of my mate the stair whisperer, Bob Lussier, when capturing this shot. Bob has some pretty incredible images of staircases if you haven’t seen them. As with some recent images of mine, the last step in the workflow for this image was a run through onOne’s Focal Point software. I can’t say how much I’m starting to get into this part of their suite. Just an ever-so-slight focal blur on the top right and bottom left corner is what really made this image for me; it really helps to direct the viewers eye down and around the central pillar through the frame. You can apply this focal blur with a very heavy hand if you so desire, but what I’m finding with Focal Point is for me at least, less is soooo much more.