Top 20 of Emerging Photographer of the Year

The for past few years I have been entering Capture Magazine's Emerging Photographer of the Year. Each year I seem to make it into the top 10 or 20 but I've never won. There are some truly amazing looking photos in the entries (and some not so amazing ones) so it's worth having a look if you're interested. Here is a link to the Landscape category in which I enter http://www.capturemag.com.au/atep-2019/landscape-2019 but I'm sure you can navigate to the other categories if you're still keen.

One thing I tell everyone that asks me about entering competitions is that you need to enter images that match the style of the competition. Look at past winners and galleries and only enter if you think you have something up to that standard and style. This particular competition requires a portfolio of 6 images. When entering a series like this, they all need to be of the same theme (whatever that may be) and of the same quality. There is no point entering 5 mountain shots with the northern lights and then 1 of a sunny seascape. Instant fail, no matter how good they are. Artistic abstracts also perform quite well.

Anyway, my point is, for this year I left it quite late to enter and I didn't think I had a cohesive series to put together from my favourite images from the year. But I still wanted to enter.
So, I kind of threw together a joke series (funny to me anyway) to see how it would go.

And here it is

SAND
http://www.capturemag.com.au/photocompentry/sand

So why is it a joke series?

Because I followed my rules and picked what I thought was a boring subject, shot in the middle of the day, handheld, while I was teaching other people photography on a workshop. I didn't set out to shoot a series of images for a competition, I was just snapping away and ended up picking these out months later. I spent about 10-20min picking out images and editing them to look the same. I called it Sand and didn't bother with a description because anything I wrote would have been made up crap to sound profound and wise anyway. I wanted to see how I'd go if I didn't bother to try so hard.

I made it into the top 20.

This really shows how consistency is key. As well as artistic aesthetics over technical skill is important.

This isn't a jab at the competition itself or the winners. I do enjoy entering and the winners of each category deserve to win with the brilliant sets of images they enter (even if I have some issue with aerial abstract constantly outperforming more traditional shots.) Here is the winning series from the landscape category http://www.capturemag.com.au/photocompentry/winter-s-ant-farm

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