I’ve shot the Gladstone Memorial several times before, usually in lovely, bright light. Until recently it was inaccessible because of the seemingly endless mess the unwanted and ineptly carried out tram works – not content with blocking entire roads for years as they worked they even buggered up pavements and the small park in the West End where the memorial sits. Walking home from doing some night shots in the city centre recently I saw it was open again and as I was carrying the tripod I paused and thought – why have I never shot this at night? In the dark with only ambient illumination from streetlights several feet away the statues all around the sides of the memorial looked very different from the bright days I had shot them on before.

The figure of a hooded lady particularly caught my eye and so I thought I’d quickly set up the tripod and camera again and try a couple of shots – quite a dark spot and the camera had to sit with the shutter open for a good while, drinking in every stray photon it could to come out with the above image. I was quite pleased with how it came out, especially shooting in black and white (I never use PhotoShop to greyscale my pics, if it is in B&W it means I shot it in B&W originally, I refuse to bodge or fake my images) – if you click on the image and look at the larger versions on my Flickr you can see it brought out the scant available light so well you can even see a couple of stars in the background. As it had come out so well I decided to take a closer shot and zoomed in – amazing how different the sculptures look after dark, almost creepy…