Street photography

It's very easy to take street photos and only think about shooting from street level, photographing things as you see them. This photo immediately stood out because of the way it's been shot from above, with the shadows of the boys making it clear that they're enjoying a game of street cricket. Removing the colour often helps draw the viewer's focus to detail and texture in street shots, and that's the case here, where colour would have distracted from the drama created by the light.

The best street photos don't just show an interesting person or an interesting place, they suggest relationships between person and place, or person and person. Here the idealised, sun-drenched image of an elderly woman sweeping up painted onto the wall contrasts with a real, identically dressed elderly lady walking up the hill in the shadows, looking a bit less cheery than her fictional counterpart. It's a nice mirroring, and the image wouldn't have worked half as well with a different person or without the mural.

The first thing you see in this image is colour: bold, bright red. Symmetry always adds a pleasing sense of balance to an image, and what the judges especially liked about this one was the way the photographer had used a puddle to reflect the building and two street vendors, who fit into their environment in the same way as the graffiti, being splashes of contrasting colour against the doors. Using reflections is a clever technique, and while the scene is interesting and colourful enough in itself, doubling it really makes the shot stand out.

Every person has a relationship with the streets they're moving through, and this young man is clearly perfectly at home in his environment, having shed his shoes to take a relaxing lie down. While we received a lot of photos with most of the colours stripped out to allow one to 'pop', in this photo the effect is purely natural, with the blue and orange of the young man's clothing standing out boldly against the neutral stone, and the vertical angle of his lower legs contrasting with the horizontal lines of the steps.

Photographing eyecatching people is a delicate art; focus too hard on what makes them distinctive and you run the risk of making them more a 'thing' than a person. That was never likely to happen in this case as the accordion player has hidden his human face. Nonetheless, including plenty of background was a clever move on the photographer's part, as it shows the isolation of the busker, an eccentric creature in a world of humans who pass him by.

There's just enough detail in this shot of pilgrims headed to El Rocio in Andalucia – you can see the features on the carriage, and the stripes on the nearest man's shirt, but not much more than that. Clouds of dust help to separate the groups of pilgrims, while excellently-used lens flare forms a focal point - you could almost imagine that the people are all headed towards the sun. Photographing festivals is tricky, as in many situations you've a multitude of subjects all doing different things, but this shot is balanced and effective.

Several factors come into play to make this an effective image. First, and most obvious, is the location: identical grey walls separating the smokers divide the image vertically, so the eye is constantly drawn up and down the image. The fact that the workers are uniform, all wearing similar-coloured clothing and facing in the same direction, gives the shot a sense of unity that would be lacking if one had their back facing outwards or was wearing a different-coloured outfit.

The colourful streets of Harar make a stunning backdrop for street photography, which most photographers seem to do in black-and-white. You couldn't strip out colour from a scene like this! Usually you'd worry about a burnt-out sky spoiling a shot, but here the white balances out the pink and blue walls, and gives a sense of emptiness above that enhances the cramped feeling of the narrow streets. The angle of the walls force you forward, following the woman into the scene.

The glamour of airbrushed advertising is all around us on city streets, and this shot beautifully juxtaposes the glossy, artificial world of ads with the reality of an ordinary person sneaking out for a quick smoke. The judges really liked the shift in scale between the poster and the man, the hard edges of the oblong door cutting through the perfect, soft curves of the face in the poster, and the contrast between the reddish colours in the poster and blues in the man's clothing.