Quarterly Competition – Architecture – 26 June 2025

Mark Reeves was our judge for this event. He gave an excellent presentation on his architectural photography at the beginning of the competition. His website can be found here: https://markreevesphotography.co.uk/home

Several of his striking images had very dark skies. Not surprisingly, quite a few of us produced similar photos. In these, boring grey skies had been made black, as you will see later on.

Last week Mark Reeves presented the results from our Team competition on Architecture. The way our team competitions work is that willing club members are herded into Teams of nominally 5 members. A team captain is appointed who is responsible for organising team outings, and coordinating the choosing of his/her team entries. We had 5 teams, each team having to enter 10 photos, with a minimum of 1 and a maximum of 2 photos per team member. Late joiners meant some teams had more than 5 members, but each team is still limited to 10 photos.

Captain Kate led our team. She miraculously motivated us to go on three team outings. We visited the Westend, the city centre, and RGU at Garthdee. We all enjoyed going out together and getting to know the other team members better.

We happened a be cat sitting for a week in London during the 3 months of the competition, so we made an effort to visit interesting architectural locations. One of these was Greenwich Park where to my surprise I was told by security that I was not allowed to take photos, only family snaps.

Canary Wharf is privately owned and the rules even more restrictive. Railway stations and shopping malls are similarly places where it is best not to turn up with a large camera and a tripod. Nobody seems to care if you use your phone though ;-). So my phone got quite a lot of use. The “proper” camera stayed in the bag when I wanted to avoid being hassled by overzealous security personnel.

Fortunately, both Aberdeen universities have no such restrictions. Many of the entries were taken at these locations. Some of the buildings are quite striking. No escaping the dark sky treatment here in this first image of the library building at Aberdeen University.

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The Aberdeen exhibition centre – TECA – near the airport was another building that appeared more than once in the final team entries. I’ve ranked these by cloud. I leave it to the reader to decide which is the best of these 3 photos….

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The Maggie’s Centre is in the grounds of Aberdeen Royal Infirmary designed by Zaha Hadid. It was quite well represented among the entries. Amazing how the same building can end up looking different in each of the shots.

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Here are some more images from the competition. The series ends with those that are highly commended by Mark Reeves. And of course also includes the runner-up and winning image.

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Highly Commended Images

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Runner Up Image

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And the Winning Image is:

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Two teams shared the honours of First Prize:

Team 3 consisting of: Stephen Lynch, Susan Gordon, David Drage, Iain Cridland, Ian Booth and Pamela Adam

And Team 5 comprising of: Dave Lynch, Gregor McAbery, Ian Grosvenor, Kirsty McAbery, Fiona Dyas, Amanda Reid and Annette Murty

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Final words

One of our most enjoyable competitions so far, Great choice of the theme by Sue Heard. Mark Reeves did a fantastic job inspiring us to create cool images at the start of the competition. It made us explore our urban environment with different eyes.

Note: all comments are by the editor, not the judge who did a great job of showing how images could be improved in a positive way. And of course all images are copyright of the respective photographers. Contact us if you want to use any of the photos.