Landscape Photography Competitions, who needs them

Sunrise through the Branches

Hi folks, one of my traditional landscape photography from the Wakefield region posts today. I’m having to post a couple of my B-sides from earlier this year when we had all the snow. I found it during after a bit of an unforced photo library reorganisation, the less said about that the better! It wasn’t my favorite shot of the morning but I thought I’d put it up, if anything to remind people what a sunrise looks like as it seems so long since we’ve seen a decent one (although it was a nice day yesterday). The details were ISO100, f/16, 1/8 at 32mm and if I recall correctly I’ll have had my Neutral density grad on. Even though I have used a silhouetted tree and branch to frame the sky I still wanted the snowy field behind to be visible, so I still used a grad, otherwise everything but the sky would be black. I polished it up a little in lightroom as I tend to do with shots with all my landscape photography with quite a high dynamic range.

Why the unrelated title you say? Well I’m getting to that. About the same time this was taken I thought I’d put a few of my images in for a Landscape photography, not something I normally do, probably due in part to a spirit crushingly high fear of failure, but as I suspect I was probably buoyed up by the Christmas period and thought why not? Needless to say I didn’t win, hence the lack of “Yay I won a landscape photography competition” posts recently. At this point I would like to point out that this may come across as a bit of a bitter sounding, sore loser type rant, which could well be partly true, but only very slightly. It really isn’t meant to come across like that.

Anyway I was looking at this one remembering how cold it was and how early I’d got up and trudged to this location, told you it might sound bitter. I then took a look at some of the photos shortlisted for this competition, I’m not going to say which competition it was or post any other photographers shots as they aren’t here to defend their work. One of the judges was one of my favorite landscape photographers (hence the reason for entering) and I thought, they’ll know a good landscape photo when they see it.

A Cold Morning

Imagine my surprise when I see 2 of the 4 shortlisted landscapes were indoor! I think one may have been a photo of a skirting board another favorite being a half submerged car taken pretty much on the stroke of midday, golden hours or what! So I thought what is the point of waiting for the ideal conditions, getting up at some stupid time to go out and really use the light to compose a shot with some emotion, when you can just snap an abandoned shopping trolley in a canal, maybe even stay in bed and create a landscape photo from there! A few days later I read an article about how people really are taking mediocre shots and calling them art, and whats worse is half the judges agree with them!

The point is, to answer my question, the early mornings and the bad conditions and the trudging around in a field are what make the photo worth while when you get one, and it really is great when everything seems to fall into place and you come away with a great photo. If anything getting nothing a few times makes it even sweeter when you come away with something half decent. At the very least you’ve got out and exercised your mind and body, beats Eastenders! And if some judge doesn’t agree and thinks a bloke sunbathing constitutes a landscape photo that’s their opinion, so what, least my nan likes them!