A long exposure in Exchange Square, Manchester, near the Printworks. One couple stands still long enough to register against the background, their embrace cutting through the motion blur of other pedestrians drifting around them as ghostly outlines.
You don't set this up. You hold the shutter open and wait. The police car passing in the background adds a streak of blue to the traffic light trails behind the couple. The neon of Café Rouge and the Hard Rock Cafe sign date the scene. This image won a photography award.
A night shot of the exterior apse of Manchester Cathedral, looking up at two illuminated stained glass windows set into the curved stonework. The floodlighting bathes the stone in a warm amber glow, while tree branch shadows fall across the facade and the carved columns between the windows.
The windows glow from within, their colours reading clearly against the dark sky. Post-processing in Photoshop has been applied to enhance the image, though the shadow patterns and the warmth of the lit stonework are striking enough in the base shot alone.
'Madchester' graffiti on the wall of a partly demolished building in Salford, shot in black and white to emphasise the texture of the deteriorating brickwork. The wildstyle lettering fills the frame, its decorative bubble forms set against weathered brick, peeling render, and weeds growing at the base of the wall.
The word carries weight beyond the lettering. Madchester was the late 1980s and early 1990s cultural movement centred on Factory Records, the Haçienda, and bands including The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays. Finding it on a building in the process of being torn down gives the image an unintended elegiac quality.
Taken after closing time in St Ann's Square, Manchester, this drops to a low angle to place the fountain in the foreground, where the arcade's blue neon reflects across the disturbed water surface. The shuttered entrance and empty pavement strip the location of its daytime character.
The colour contrast between the cool teal neon and the warm amber street light on the upper façade drives the image tonally. The exposure holds detail in the illuminated sign while letting the surrounding architecture fall into deep shadow, framing the lit elements and keeping the composition clean.
A long exposure of the Manchester Wheel in Exchange Square, taken at night while the wheel was in rotation. The slow shutter turns each gondola into a streak of light, building the full wheel into a solid disc of concentric white circles against the dark sky.
The composition frames the wheel to the left, with the glass and steel façade of the adjacent building anchoring the right of the frame. Pedestrians blurred in the foreground add scale and a sense of movement. The vertical format emphasises the height of the wheel relative to the surrounding city-centre architecture.
