And The Winner Is…….not

Audubon announced the winners of their 2015 Photography Awards today. I did not win, but I now have a finer tuned appreciation of what they are looking for, so,….Next Year!

This is the photo of mine that was chosen as a semi-finalist in the “Fine Art” category–a new category for them this year:

Tapestry _ blog- Most of the the other images I submitted were new creations. This one I composed in 2011.

Here is a link to the Winners

You will have to scroll sideways (or down) to the fourth image to view the “Fine Art” winner. It is a Black & White of silhouetted gulls, cormorants, and terns. Very nice!

Here is a link to the Top 100 . All of them are awesomely spectacular bird photos. None of them come from the “Fine Art” category. It would be nice to see the other semi-finalists in the Fine Art category, but I can’t find a link to them.

 

Upside Down Up

In 2005, when I bought a 4 mega pixal Cannon A520—purely for keeping a personal journal—I took the background shot in this photo at Jackson Bottom Wetlands. Looking at it in my trial version of Photoshop Elements, I liked it better upside down and thought all it really needed was a duck flying through right side up. I did not have any decent pictures of ducks, but I stuck one in there anyway.

That got me started searching out what I began to call “puddle shots”—reflections I could flip to reveal a different world. Many hundreds of puddle shots later, this one is still one of my favorites. All it needed was some decent waterfowl (White-fronted Geese) flying through it right side up.Upside Down Up _ blog-

Skykomish River Valley

A couple of days ago I submitted ten photo-creations to Audubon’s 2015 Photography Awards contest. I was happy they had an “Art”category this year because, though I do have some pretty nice bird photos, I don’t have any as magnificent as those that typically win this competition. I decided to post my entries here one at a time—there is quite a bit of detail in some of them :-). The first is my homage to the eagles that regularly accent my view of the valley. The fun thing for me with Photoshop is that I can take photos that range from excellent to pretty awful on their own and mix them up to create my own visual poetry.Skykomish River Valley_blog-