Crowds

We loved this image. There are no gaps between the children, so the frame is completely crowded. You get the impression the children are packed in around you. However, the details of the faces are clear: it's a crowd, but it's a crowd of individuals, all with their own personalities. The limited colour palette – the children wear warm-coloured clothes in just a few colours – means your eye is drawn to the area of the highest contrast, the children's faces, illuminated by the brilliant sunshine.

The differing heights in this picture add interest to what would be a mundane crowd scene if shot at ground level. The people on the same level as the photographer are larger, but mostly seen in fragments, as elbows, hands or the backs of heads. You see more of the folk lower down, but they're smaller and less distinctive, becoming part of a speckled mass in the distance. The shot is nicely crisp, too; with the sunlight and lack of movement you get the sense that this is an expectant crowd, rather than an excited one.

The angle from which this shot was taken, looking directly down onto the crowded square, caught the our eyes here. The colourful, broad umbrellas actually make this a more interesting shot than it would have been on a dry day, as they're easier to pick out than heads, which would've been much smaller, and in neutral colours. Including a small part of the buildings in one corner of the picture turns what could be an anonymous crowd shot into one of an identifiable location, and also directs the viewer's eye across the image, encouraging interaction.

Rain is a notorious part of the British music festival experience (Glastonbury, in particular, is famed for its muddiness), and this photographer has captured the crowd's defiance of bad weather in this shot. The use of HDR techniques has really brought out the textures in the cloudy sky and the metal barriers in front of the audience. The lack of structures – the barrier and a distant white tent are all that is visible – means this shot really is all about the crowd.

Like the photo of the festival crowd, this one uses HDR techniques, and again plenty of detail is revealed in the sky, but it's also brought out the textures in the buildings and metal hand rail, creating a hard, shiny environment that contrasts with the rounded shapes of the people, especially the children in the foreground. We liked the way patches of particular colours are repeated through the image, so the child's top matches the pink billboard on the central building, while the blues on the billboards resonate with the checked shirt of one man and the blue shirt of another, drawing the eye up and down the image.

You can't see much of the crowd in this photo, but the sea of umbrellas tells you that there is a multitude of people in this street - and hint at the rain that is muting the visible colours and creates the low-contrast conditions. The photographer found a really nice vantage point for this shot, making it possible to capture the umbrellas leading away into the distance, but also setting the tiered roofs of the buildings against the sky, adding extra shape and interest to the scene.

This picture is packed with fantastic detail – the photographer has clearly worked hard to capture the ornate details of the architecture with a narrowish aperture and freeze the crowd in what must have been difficult, dark lighting conditions. Because you know the average size of people, when you look at the shot and see the crowd contained in the very bottom of the frame, you immediately get a sense of the scale of the ornate building, its curving roof and stage.

We had a few shots taken from above, but what made this one appeal to us was the deliberate inclusion of the stone angel, which is light in colour and faces the opposite way to almost all of the humans in the picture. The angel also gives the picture a context, and forces you to ask questions: is it a church or civic building? Why is the man touching it? Why are all the other people ignoring it? Are they here for a united purpose? In including the sculpture in the shot, the photographer forces you to interact with the scene.

The water spraying over the crowd gives this shot a real feeling of energy and exuberance. The photographer has had to use a very fast shutter speed to capture the crowd, and that's also helped to capture the water as separate droplets, which stand out strongly against the black sky. With most of the crowd standing on the ground, the young man on his friend's shoulders, very close to the source of the spray, really stands out, and adds to the sense of energy in the shot.