This year marks the sixth year of Capture the Cathedral, our annual photography competition. Every year the standard gets better and better as entrants seek to impress the judges with images of this beautiful historic building.
Mike Shaft (BBC Radio Manchester), Grant Mitchell (Design Director at Glorious Creative), Vincent Cole (MEN photographer) and Joanne Hooper (Cathedral Communications and Marketing Officer) returned to the judging panel to go through 200 images and select just two winners.
The winners are as follows:
Architecture and Stained Glass – Red by Michael Taylor
Something Different – Cathedral Nave Spin by Lamar Francois
The Capture the Cathedral Overall Winner for 2018 is Michael Taylor
On hearing the news Michael said:
“Firstly, I would like to thank Jo, Manchester Cathedral and all of the team who, annually, put on this great photographic competition. I encourage everyone to attend the excellent exhibition. Manchester has some really talented photographers.
When I decided to enter the competition, it was apparent to me that the Cathedral has been photographed, over the years, thousands of times. My challenge was to try and capture images that would hopefully be unique.
Over the course of 8 weeks, I spent many hours looking in the nooks and crannies of the Cathedral for those unique, unusual images and one shot in particular, a spider.
I am pleased to say that after 7 fruitless weeks and 1 week before the close of the competition I found our 8 legged friend. Proudly, he is in the exhibition.
The beautiful architecture, structure, organ and windows are photographed daily by thousands upon thousands of visitors to the cathedral. My entries into the ‘Stained Glass and Architecture’ category needed to be very different to the many photographs already taken and needed a different approach. I needed a variable.
I had looked at the ‘Fire window’ on every occasion that I was in the Cathedral. On the day I got my image ‘Red’ was the day I got my variable and that variable was light. On that particular morning, the light was cascading through the window and created beautiful colours onto the stonework. That was my shot. I had always intended to shoot the window from a very low angle to give the viewer a different perspective. I set the camera on a tripod and used a long exposure, an f20 aperture to get the depth of field and keep the picture pin sharp. I would move the tripod/camera after each shot to create a slightly different angle and therefore a slightly different shot. I maybe took 12 in total from which I selected ‘Red’, it worked beautifully.
I am very proud of this image and I was excited and thrilled to bits that it was chosen as the overall of winner of the “Capture the Cathedral 2018” competition.
Long may the competition continue.”
