And the Winning Photo is…
I just won a photo competition! This is the best birthday present I’ve had in a long time (actually, yesterday was my birthday, but WTF).
I recently started reading and posting on two Street Photography web forums: the Nonphotography street photography forum is a fairly friendly allcomers’ site, where I feel pretty knowledgable in comparison with most of the posters there, and as soon as I went on there I was happy offering out advice and setting myself up as something of a guru.
By contrast, John Brownlow’s street photography forum has some very high calibre photographers posting on it, and is not always welcoming to newcomers as I found out when I was fairly roughly treated in reply to my first post there. So I’ve mainly been just lurking, hoping to learn from people more experienced than myself.
So I was all the more pleased when I won John Brownlow’s fortnightly photography salon, against some very stiff competition. The topic for this salon was “the uncanny terrain vague”. When I first saw this, I had no idea what it meant, and certainly didn’t think I’d be up to entering a photo. However, by chance I was browsing through some photos from a year ago when I stumbled on the “camouflaged snowball” photo which I posted here recently and it screamed “Terrain vague! Uncanny!” at me (incidentally, of the three versions I posted, the first was the uncorrected photo, the second was the version I worked up a year ago and the third was a new correction, utilising my new knowledge. The winning version was similar to the third but slightly more natural-looking).
I wondered about entering, then watched the first few salon entries trickle in, saw the direction many were headed and decided that my “snowball” would be appropriate, so I gritted my teeth and submitted. My highest goal was to have it shortlisted in the final results, but my main hope was that it wouldn’t be torn to pieces.
It’s been playing on my mind a little in the two days since entries closed, but for the most part I wasn’t expecting anything out of this salon so I didn’t think about it too much. But this morning, when I saw there had been new posts on the topic, I headed over to the forum and started reading slowly, deliberately, and with one or two butterflies in my stomach. My eyes kept skipping ahead to look for my username “gulch”, but I managed to read through everything up to that point (which felt like a lot more entries than I’d seen previously). Then when I saw that, joy, I’d been shortlisted - along with a very complimentary comment - I couldn’t help skipping down to the end. I was speechless when I saw the result. And rather scared: my “prize” is that I have to set and judge the next salon. I don’t know quite where to start, but at least my win has made me a little more confident.