What makes film great?

Smart shot. Great photographers learn to work with the repeated patterns that surround our everyday lives, and make pictures out of them.

There's a fantastic visceral sense of industry, of assembly lines, of the repetition of modern life with these rail cars, heaped with gravel. There's no interacting people to beak the pattern, just the frame of the rail wagons either side.

The lack of colour - even though this is a colour photograph - is another strength. Sometimes less is more.

The kind of travel street scene that makes you want to book a flight, pack a bag and bring plenty of film with you. There's a fantastic layering to this shot, the playful kids leading to the cloaked woman heading towards the arch and the alley beyond.

The timelessness added to this by black-and-white film really adds to the mood. You really have to search the picture to guess how recently it was taken, too.

On top of the framing, it's technically a great exposure, too. This is a glorious picture.

Fireworks photographs require patience, preparation and timing. Getting well-exposed images with the characteristic blooming fireworks usually requires a tripod, long exposure times and great technique.

This is a brilliant exposure, layering firework after firework to create a riot of red and gold. The river's reflections helps balance the bottom of the frame too, the colours add balance without taking the eye away from the fireworks.

Great fireworks photographs are a lot harder to achieve than you might think, especially on film.

It's been a long time since disposable cameras were a summer holiday staple. In the right hands, and in the right situations, these focus-free, no-frills snappers can create great photographs. This is one of them.

This shot is pure poetry, the swimmer in a Jesus Christ pose in a sea full of sparkling light. There's a wonderful softness that comes from the camera's cheap plastic lens, and an otherworldly greenish tinge. It's like something from as half-remembered dream.

I could see this becoming an album cover.

How did that mud get there? We're left to wonder... the boy's smile and far away stare are pure calmness. There's no hint of what might have happened to cause such a mess.

I like the vantage point, too. Kids tend to be photographed from the adult's eye-level - us looking down on them. This really turns that cliche on its head.

It's a shame the sky behind him is such a featureless expanse. This is a shot with bags of character.

Bellows cameras were all the rage in the days of Queen Victoria, giving portraits a characteristic look – as does tintype, a photographic process that creates a positive image on a very thing tin plate.

Bellows cameras can create portraits with very shallow depth of field, meaning that you have to be razor sharp on the focusing. This picture has it, the eyes sharp as a tack, and the tip of the nose a faded blur.

Old techniques still have their place.

Rob Hirst of Midnight Oil - one of the musicians who helped give me tinnitus in the two decades I spent as a music journalist.

This is lovely framing , the cymbals balancing the drummer's position. I love the blur from the drumstick too - this show that this must have been handheld, and shot at a reasonably slow shutter speed.

This really has the feel of 70s/80s rock photography. There's bags of mood here, and lovely grit and grain from the film.

Fantastic environmental portraiture, using nothing more than natural light and fantastic subjects.

The girl's wary eyes shine out of the shadow, and her brother's twisting body creating an unusual shape. This is all tension, a moment frozen.

There's so much detail here that you start unpicking as you look at it - the necklace around the boy's neck, the holes in the girl's top, the flash of red from the bow in her hair. This is a truly fantastic image.

Street photography is all about creating the sublime from snatched moments that most of us miss. The kiss is centre-frame - normally no-no, as many photography tutors would tell you - but it's balanced by the rushing figure, a blur on the right-hand side. There's that gulf of empty space on the left hand side which adds an element of tension to it aswell.

The gritty grain here - it looks like Kodak's classic Tri-X to me - adds to the retro feel. Fantastic.

This is a nice slice of retro reportage... the fire crew's gear tell us this is a good couple of decades ago.

There's a great contrast here between the raging red and gold of the fire - which is in bitingly sharp focus - and the hazy, partly shrouded figures of the firefighters, wreathed in smoke.

I love the detail in the fire, those flames curling around the support of the structure.

This exercise is the kind of thing most of us would never have seen; documentary photography is all about this kind of detail.

You can spend your whole life trying to find a street scene like this - a face framed with lifeless mannequins.

There's so much that's great in this image. Not just the placement of the woman next to the mannequin, but the difference between her lined features and the smoothness of the dummy.

Their eyes too seem to mirror each other, both pointing down to something we can't see out of frame.

Finally, the hat acts as a leading line from the dummy to the woman. It all comes together so naturally.

If you told me this was a Steve McCurry picture from the 1980s, I'd have believed you. If it was just of the two boys confidently posing it'd be lovely; but it's the split-second timing of that figure diving off the structure in the river which really makes it.

I also like this for the fact that it's bright and attention-grabbing even though it's not a bright, blue-skied day. There's a painterly quality to these colours that give it a suitably vintage feel.

The business end of a lion, captured with the kind of timing that wouldn't be out of place in the pages of National Geographic.

The telephoto lens has really isolated the lion's head - there are no distractions from this dramatic yawning pose. It's a great dark background that doesn't fight with the subject, and there's magnificent detail here - the jutting tongue and bright white whiskers, and the texture of the fur.

Brilliant timing and technical skill - this is a shot to be proud of.