It's been likened to a modern-day Lowry or Valette painting.
But this atmospheric scene of Manchester in the rain was captured on an iPhone.
The image, showing the railway bridges of Castlefield, was shot by Salford photographer Simon Buckley during yesterday's downpours and quickly went viral after he shared it on social media.
Its matchstick men-like figures have seen admirers compare it with the work of L.S. Lowry, while others have drawn parallels with the colour palette of Adolphe Valette, the French impressionist painter best-known for his urban landscapes of Manchester.
Simon told the M.E.N he was astonished by the response to the photograph.
"I was out last night and due to meet a colleague to do some filming but the weather forecast was hopelessly wrong. It was supposed to be sunny," he said.
"I set off to meet him around Castlefield and got off the tram and suddenly there was a deluge. I stood under the covers and was watching people scurry past with their umbrellas. It's very visually beautiful watching people in the rain.
"I looked to my left and saw the buildings were all silhouetted and quite monochrome. I looked at the weather and thought: 'Just do it.'
"I ran to the bridge and and just got instantly soaked. I stood there and managed to take about five frames before my iPhone packed up on me. It was too wet to make the screen work.
"I was drenched, people were laughing at me as I was coming back to the Metrolink station."
Simon edited the photo using the Snapseed app before posting it to Twitter 'almost as an afterthought'.
In the last 16 hours it's been liked and shared thousands of times on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and Simon has already sold nearly 200 prints on his online shop .
One admirer wrote on Twitter: "Beautiful. Could almost be a modern-day Lowry."
Another added: "That is an unbelievably good picture - somehow seems like a ‘Lowry’. Brilliant."
"Wow! Reminds me of the Manchester paintings by Adolphe Valette," another observed.
"Valette in the 21st century," another Twitter user added.
Simon said he had also noticed the parallels in the scene below him with the two painters' work before taking the photograph.
"Lowry and Valette have come into it," he said.
"I suppose when I was looking down, I couldn't see clearly, but it was almost an instinctive frame. The rain was blowing into my eyes but I was aware of it, of how the scene looked and how the figures were silhouetted and stick-like, and there was a hazy, pastel quality to the colours.
"I make my photos quite painterly anyway."
Simon has amassed a cult following for his ongoing Not Quite Light project, which captures Manchester and Salford in the half-light of dusk and dawn.
But he said he had never experienced such an overwhelming reaction to one of his pieces before.
"I think it captures something of Manchester that we all feel we know," he said.
"You get the sense of the Victorian self and it invokes something within us of the Manchester that we understand. It's not the shiny, modern Manchester. It's the Manchester we feel."
