As I tweeted the other day, once again I found myself in Manchester chasing the setting sun like a moth round a dying light bulb. I arrived I guess probably around 45 minutes before the sun was scheduled to set with nothing specific in mind. I had a loose plan to shoot the tops of buildings in the remaining light with a view to trying to juxtapose old and new as much as possible. As time was pretty tight I constrained myself to a relatively small area of the city centre; from St. Peter's Square across to Spinningfields. The top image was pretty much all I could get of the library due to the monumental quantity of builder's fencing around it's base, but I quite like the way the lighter stone sits against the darker brick of the council offices. The image was tweaked in Lightroom (I pushed the blacks and the fill a bit) and then opened it up in Silver Efex Pro and went to work utilising a preset, adding a smidge of selenium toning and then a little vignette.

The bottom image was taken funnily enough near the Avenue.... Not bad as a publicity shot I guess but not much else to say. I had to wait a while for the breeze to blow the banner into just the right position and have punched the blues quite a bit in Lightroom but done very little else.

Both were shot hand held. For the image of the library I had to shoot from some distance to get the angle I wanted, so I shot with the 70-200 racked all the way out and used a lamp post to hold the lens up against to provide some stability, though even at 200mm I've still had to crop it a little.

Finally, I've got a bit of a feature going up on Photo Creative 365 this weekend in their Sunday Showcase, so head over here on Sunday to check it out.

Have a great weekend. Neil