Phill Rawlins Online - Manchester aviation and transport photography

Manchester by night

The city after dark: the Cathedral, the CIS Tower, Urbis and the Arndale Centre, photographed on long exposures.

Night photography from a stable surface, with long exposures and a low sensitivity setting. Click any photograph for a larger view.

The skyline after dark

Manchester Cathedral, the CIS Tower and Urbis photographed at night
Cathedral, CIS Tower and Urbis. Three centuries of the city’s architecture lit up side by side, which is roughly the point of the photograph.
The CIS Tower in Manchester photographed at night
The CIS Tower. Completed in 1962 at 118 metres, and for decades the tallest building in the city. Its mosaic cladding of 14 million tiles is the reason it still reads as a landmark at night.
Urbis and the Arndale Tower at night with floodlit fountains
Urbis and the Arndale Tower. The Arndale Tower with its illuminated rooftop sign, the Urbis glass wedge alongside it, and the floodlit columns and fountains of the square in the foreground. Urbis opened in 2002 as a museum of the modern city; it later became the National Football Museum.
Coloured light trails across an office facade, photographed by moving the camera during a long exposure
Lights, deliberately blurred. Not a view of the city but a photograph of it: the camera was moved during a long exposure so that the illuminated signs and office windows drew coloured trails across the frame.

How these were taken

Night photography with the equipment available in 2003 came down to controlling two things: camera movement and exposure. Every frame here was taken with the camera resting on something solid — a wall, a railing, a bridge parapet — with a delayed shutter release so that pressing the button did not move the camera.

A long exposure on a city street does something that a short one cannot: it turns traffic into streaks of light and renders the sky as a soft orange glow from the sodium street lighting reflected off low cloud. That glow is characteristic of Manchester at night in this period and it is the reason these photographs look the way they do.

Stopping down

Bright points of light — street lamps, lit windows, floodlit stonework — produce unpleasant blobs if the lens is wide open. Stopping down to f/8 or beyond turns them into points with radiating spikes, which is what makes a night skyline photograph look crisp rather than washed out.

What is missing

The original page carried two further night photographs, of Spinningfields and of the gasometers at Salford. Neither was captured by the Internet Archive, and neither site looks anything like it did in 2003, so those views cannot be re-photographed either.

The photography notes cover the technique in more detail.