Manchester Canal and the unifying power of photography

With a touch of the man-flu I really wasn't feeling it today but with the coincidence of the sun shining in an otherwise wet and miserable November aligning with my day off I decided to force myself to go into Manchester to take some images of the graffiti in the Castlefield canal basin, something I've been meaning to do for a while.

The sharp and low autumn light was perfect and as I dragged myself around with the odd cough and splutter and a few bones aching it was doing wonders to raise my spirits. However, what I never expected was to be turned into some kind of a celebrity by a bunch of teenagers who all seemed to randomly want to take my photo.

It began when I noticed a crowd of black-anoraked, apparently disorderly and noisy "yoofs" hanging around a dark corner of the basin. I call them that because I hold my hands up, I was completely prejudiced against their appearance, given that where I live such young individuals frequently go with type and are, to be blunt, often complete old-lady terrorising, e-bike assholes.

However, as one of them emerged into the light I could see that he was holding a large SLR and taking pictures of the graffiti as I was. I watched for a minute to realise that they all had cameras and were snapping away at pretty much everything. I then heard a shout from another lad on the other side of the canal

"Hey Sir," he shouted (I kid you not, he actually said that :)

"Can you pretend to take a picture again so I can take one of you doing it?" He shouted.

"Hmmmm yeah," I replied, pretending to take a close up of a wall.

"Now you take one of me doing the same," He shouted back.

"Ok, yeah." I replied, immediately conscious that my camera was set fully to manual and it would be crap, anyhow I snapped anyway and here it is and at least it caught the moment ..

At this point I could see there were a couple of teachers knocking around which put me at ease, so just carried on taking photos until another lad came up to me ..

"Can I see your pictures?" He asked,

"Yeah sure," I replied and showed him,

"Whoah that's well good, how did you do that?" He asked, referring to the short depth of field in this image below.

In my best teacher way (I am actually a teacher and have been for many years) I started to tell him about aperture and how it affected DoF, of which he was completely unaware, saying,

"Ah we're not on that yet, it's our first lesson,"

Bless him, I thought, best not to overwhelm the lad (and God forbid, step on a fellow teacher's toes and ruin their planning), so I just told him to concentrate for now on choosing interesting subjects and composition and the rest would come in time.

I continued gathering images for a while with the group flitting around me and was really enjoying the light, proving it to be a goldmine for nice shots ..

Eventually, after a few more chats with the kids and their teachers they headed off back to school and I cracked on with the task in hand to finish my little mini project, quite relieved that despite the satisfaction of bonding across the generations due to the medium of photography, I was in my own little world again. I'm pleased with the results below and would have taken even more if it hadn't been for my man-flu, which forced me home to a hot water bottle and a lemsip after a short time.

Never mind though, I ..

a) got out, instead of moping around feeling sorry for myself, b) had a nice little adventure in a meeting of cross-generational minds, and

c) came away with some good pics,

So happy days!