A dark winter evening walk along Manchester’s canal paths is not for everyone. It can be desolate, dingy and a little unnerving.
But I went with my camera to capture some of the urban canalside atmosphere. I left my tripod behind and relied on slow exposure speeds and the pools of man-made light.
At times it was just too dark, but there was still a lot to see… apart from many other human souls.
A walk around Sale Water Park in south Manchester can be a riverside stroll and even offers a spot of birdwatching.
But this was a quest to get close to a series of electricity pylons and a substation in the area. Many will say these features blight the countryside, but there is something strangely alluring about this imposing, dystopian architecture.
They’re pretty hot to photograph too…
Manchester carries on far beyond its big, handsome heart. In 1974, the metropolitan county of Greater Manchester was created, giving the city a suburban and rural hinterland.
I took a short train journey to its very edges, to the mill town of Stalybridge which used to be in Cheshire. And then the little rural town of Greenfield which sits in the shadow of mighty Saddleworth Moor and still has Lancashire in its postal addresses.
With tranquil canals, post-industrial grit, hill views and stone cottages, this was a long way from Manchester’s bright lights.
Whoever said that Manchester and its sister city of Salford are grey and rain-sodden might like to reconsider. If you take a dusk stroll by the waterways at Salford Quays by the end of the Manchester Ship Canal, you may be treated with a fantastic spectacle. The sunsets here are rich and golden and the modern buildings glint in the light.
I used my new lightweight Fuji X100T for these photographs. It performed nicely, although the fixed lens and lack of zoom means the legs have to do some extra work to nail down that desired frame.
A dusk view taken at Pomona Strand, a rather desolate stretch of Manchester’s canalways which sits between the city zone and the new buildings of Salford Quays. Very few people alight at Pomona tram stop.
After darkness falls and you venture deeper into the quays, the light and reflections intensify, urban landscape and water play against each other beautifully.
