Photography with Aidan O’Rourke, Manchester, Sunday 23 May 2010

I recently saw a post over at this excellent blog, publicising a photography day put on by Cityco, a not-for-profit who manage and market Manchester’s city centre.

On a tangent, Cityco are a new organisation to me, but I rather like their work – they organise things like the free city shuttle buses and street cleaning and generally try to make the centre a better place and get people to go there. I hear they have their eye on King St, which is looking more and more forlorn these days, so good for them.

Anyway, back to the photography day. Cityco paid for a number of high-profile Manchester photographers to take amateur photographers on a two hour tour round the city centre as part of their campaign to make Manchester photographer-friendly. This comes after increasing reports of photographers being challenged by the police or security firms for taking completely legal photographs. I applied, and was allocated to Aidan O’Rourke, which was a complete bonus as I have admired his cityscapes for a while.

So I wandered over on the very hot Sunday just gone, and met up with around 20 other shy looking people with big camera bags. Pretty much everyone had DSLRs, mostly much better than my entry-level Canon, but one couple did have point and shoots. I really felt for them as they sheepishly hid them in their pockets for most of the tour!

The theme Aidan had set was the changing and unchanging city, and we wandered around the Whitworth Street West area taking photos, all aware that there was an opportunity to get a photo in an exhibition at the Triangle if we were lucky. This made it feel a bit competitive, and when 20 photographers are all taking pictures of the Refuge Assurance building at once, its hard to know how to make your photograph different. Practical photography tips were thin on the ground, though I was reassured by Aidan that he doesn’t use a tripod for city photography, which was interesting.

Still, it was good to get out on a sunny day and use my camera, and the photos I like the most are below.

If you prefer to look at photographs than take them, there a couple of good exhibitions on right now:

A World Observed 1940 - 2010: Photographs by Dorothy Bohm is on at Manchester City Art Gallery at the moment, and is brilliant, I thoroughly recommend it. A lifetime of photographs is quite something. Til 30 August 2010

Shaped by War: Photographs by Don McCullin is on at the Imperial War Museum North, and is showcasing 50 years of the world renowned war photographer’s work. Til 13 June