Travel Photographer of the Year : Highly Commended

The winning entrants into the Travel Photographer of the Year 2012 competition were announced yesterday and I am very pleased to report that the photograph I chose to enter into the competition (‘Blue Berg’) was ‘Highly Commended’ with third place in the ‘Single Shot Water Category’. Those of you who may be familiar with my photography will no doubt recognise this photograph as it was also awarded with a Gold Award at the 2011 Australian Professional Photography awards and also won the Extreme Environment Photograph of the Year People’s Choice Award in 2011. I had not planned to enter this photograph in any further competitions but was inspired to do so by the category title: ‘Single Shot Water’ and its description ‘Water in one of its many forms. An image which encapsulates water as a liquid, solid or vapour’.

The winning prints (including my own) from Travel Photographer of the Year 2012 will be exhibited at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) in London from 12th July to 18th August 2013. Unfortunately, I will miss the exhibition in London by a single day as I need to be in Iceland for my 2013 Summer workshop; which commences on the 12th of July. I then head straight from Iceland to Svalbard and the Arctic to lead two expeditions (The Jewels of the Arctic) that take in the very best of Svalbard, Spitsbergen and Greenland. I will transit back through London in early September and thus will sadly miss the exhibition. If you are able to make it please let me know what you thought.

Footnote: What inspired me to enter the Travel Photographer of the Year competition was that it is one of the few photographic competitions today that still judges the ‘print’ rather than a compressed jpeg. I wrote recently of my disillusionment with so many of the photography competitions that market themselves today and that make their judgements solely on a compressed jpeg file. Call me ‘old school’; but the craft of producing a beautiful fine art print is one of the most enjoyable aspects of photography for me and is how I prefer to have my work judged.