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RE: Neon London
@markkujantunen also suggested doing long expo, but I’m gonna leave that to someone else.
I have tried some neons portraits, with not much success, there is something about heavy neon light that messes with the quality of the image. I’m not sure what it is but the ones I did with using just neon lights, came out suuuuuuper grainy.
I'm no expert and all this could be old news to you but I'll say this anyway, maybe only to gain some knowledge myself:
What kind of settings did you use? I've read somewhere that too high ISO values may lead to a lot of noise when shooting neon. Low ISO and slow shutter speeds are recommended. I don't really know but I could guess that the amount of random burst-like noise in light produced by fluorescent tubes may be high. To even out the noise, low ISO values in combination of slow shutter speeds would be in order - with a tripod of course. Just guessing.
I always aim for the lowest ISO I can, and that usually means using a slow shutter, when doing something a little darker inside. I get something semi useful when I used neon as an accent, and had a normal lightbulb further away to give more even light. Too lazy to find all them pictures now, but I wasn't completely happy with them, it wasn't what I had in mind.
I'm not an expert in portraits with artificial light, but I've noticed that usually neon pictures are fine when the light is close enough to the face and also the final result is better when there are at least two lights in different colors... like a blue and a purple.
Then I know for sure that the photographers who make these portraits, then do heavy photo-editing
Strange that the photos are grainy ... maybe you have to raise the ISO...