Competition in photography is a much debated topic. Some people like it and others don’t. The image above is heavily processed and entered in the “Creative Experimental” catagory in our club comp. In this image, I isolated the woman on her own layer. There was actually a friend walking with her but I removed her to make it look more lonely. I then did my blurring of the beach and water, then replaced the woman with composition in mind and I made her shadow for more realism. Lastly, I took the image back to Lightroom for finishing contrast and colour adjustments. In total, I’m guessing maybe two hours of work.

Below is a judge’s comment that I received on this image.

“the empty space, the soft colors and lone figure to show perspective is really well done. a very moody image that is nicely composed. this category though requires more experimental work than just blurring lines or panning a camera for higher scoring.”

At first, I was confused, how could this judge not recognize the work that I’d done? The reality though is that I still got 24 out of a possible 30 as a mark…….not too bad at all really. The bottom line is that I do my art for me first. If others like what I do, of course it makes me feel good but if you do something creative to please others, you will often lose interest in it eventually. I love this image and I put a lot of thought into it so that’s the most important thing to me.