A PHOTOGRAPH taken by a Worcester teenager has been voted picture of the year in an online competition.

The picture of Broadway Tower was taken by 19-year-old Merlin Cooper in April last year. He posted it onto the Broadway Tower page of Wikipedia, an online encyclopaedia, and thought nothing more of it.

But later a friend alerted him to the fact his picture had been submitted for the final of the competition. When Mr Cooper checked the website he found the picture was in the final 20, and later the same evening discovered it had won by 23 votes.

"The picture almost happened by accident with the person standing there," he said. "I was only around the tower for 15 minutes, I was not waiting with a tripod or anything, but I did use a polarizing filter. "When I took the photo I realised it was good quality so I decided to up-load it to Wiki, then people started saying it was a very good photo."

Mr Cooper, from Beech Avenue, in Barbourne, Worcester, is a former Worcester Grammer School pupil and is now a second-year physics student at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He started experimenting with photography three-years-ago and has never been taught how to use his Nikon D70 camera or how to compose pictures.

"I have never been into art, I am more a scientist and photography is just a hobby," he said.