Belfast. He picked it. I didn't argue.

He said Belfast. I said I’d been meaning to go. He said June, specifically, before the summer crowds. I said fine.

He was already looking up the Titanic Quarter before I’d agreed.

What he told me to expect

Dark. Not dark as in bad — dark as in the city has a particular quality of light that doesn’t soften. He said Belfast doesn’t apologise for what it is the way other cities do. He said I’d understand when I got there.

He was right. The city has edges. The history is visible in the walls, in the architecture, in the way people walk. You don’t shoot Belfast the way you shoot somewhere that’s trying to be liked.

The Titanic building at night in the rain. That’s the photograph. Everything else is practice for that one.

He said this before I’d unpacked. He’d already identified the shot he wanted me to get and which conditions it needed. I told him I’d make my own decisions about what to photograph.

I shot the Titanic building at night in the rain.

The knife angel

The Knife Angel sculpture. Twenty thousand blades collected from knife crime across the UK and welded into the shape of an angel. I didn’t know this existed before he sent me to see it.

He told me to wait for storm cloud. He told me to shoot it from below, looking up, so the sky was behind it. He told me the overcast light would give me the detail in the metal that direct sun would flatten.

I waited forty minutes for the cloud to position itself the way he described.

The photograph is the best technical work I’ve done.

The grand staircase

He found the civic buildings. He always finds the interiors nobody expects. The grand staircase of the city hall — Victorian, chandelier-lit, the kind of architecture that announces itself without apology.

He said: shoot the symmetry. Let the room do the work. Don’t complicate it.

I didn’t complicate it.

The Albert Clock

There’s a clock tower in the city centre, Victorian Gothic, slightly tilted from subsidence. He pointed at it before I’d oriented myself on the map.

He said: it leans. That’s the detail. That’s what makes it Belfast’s and not somewhere else’s.

He was right about that too.

His verdict

Nine out of ten. He took a point off for the weather on day two, which he claims he didn’t predict correctly and therefore cannot take credit for. He is taking credit for everything else.

My verdict is also nine. We agreed, which he found suspicious. He said the agreement was because Belfast is genuinely that good, not because either of us went easy.

I think he’s right about that as well. I’m choosing not to repeat this.