This is Rua 5 de Outubro, one of the major pedestrian roads in the old town of Alburfeira. It is also the only photo that I took with my Sigma 10mm wide angle lens; everything else on the trip was captured with my trusty 18-200 Nikon. I used the gorilla pod to keep the camera steady as I hadn’t bothered bringing a big, heavy tripod. The time of day was just perfect for a lovely evening sky. It’s just a shame that there weren’t more people in the town that night.

On first impressions this might not seem like a night time scene, but that is because of the technique used to capture the photo. Mark and I were staying a short walk down the beach at Alnmouth up in Northumberland and nearly every night we came back to photograph the boats. This was taken with my Sigma 10-20mm super wide-angle lens. I used my Nikon flash gun (hand held) to add more light to the boat (hence the shadow behind the rope) and the camera was obviously set to a very long exposure time. This is almost certainly one of my favourite boat photographs.

As you can see from the huge, illuminated sign on the top right corner of this building, we are looking at BBC Scotland’s head office. The red line at the top kept changing through all the colours of the rainbow, but I thought that red would work best. Fortunately it was a very still but cold evening in December when the above image was captured and so the reflection is nearly perfect.

Last summer I was working in Switzerland for a few days and spent one free evening walking around the centre of Zurich. I had planned a night shoot so packed my big Manfrotto tripod. The above photo shows the mouth of the Limmat River as it feeds into Lake Zurich. You can see in the background some of the iconic churches of the city such as the Fraumunster abbey on the left of the river and the two towers of the Grossmunster to the right.