Retrospective - not a bad year for my photography

Someone appreciating one of your pictures is always nice, though as judges always say "As long as you like it thats all that matters" before tearing one of your prints to pieces!  Still as I say it is nice when someone pays you a compliment and indeed it can spur you on to create more.

Recognition can take a number of forms though.  I was reflecting on the past year, as you do in December and actually its been a good year. 

In the St Neots & District Camera Club league competition I won the Novice Colour Print category and tied first in the Monochrome category with Claire Copley (check out her flower shots).

At the Clubs annual exhibition I picked up best monochrome for "Foggy Reeds"

 

Only downside to that is I got moved up to "experienced" group, much tougher so not doing so well so far this year.

On the non competition side, Photoplus magazine found a couple of my images on Flickr, which they have asked to put on their cover disc gallery.

Flickr also found three of my images "Interesting" and they made the Explored top 500.

And just this week I've been invited to join Getty images too.

I wonder what 2012 holds in store!

Flickr Photostream

What am I doing here?

I've been in a reflective mood.  We had a presentation from a photographer last Tuesday, who had more letters after his name than letters in the alphabet, and who showed many international award winning images.  This is usually a good chance to learn from an experienced photographer.  There were a few excellent images, but to my taste most of the others were not of a great standard.  In particular there were a lot of composite images where the elements seemed poorly cut out and assembled.  Faces plonked on different backgrounds where the face was "soft" (i.e. not sharp) but the backdrop was sharp, a sky dropped in on several pics which really just did not fit.  So I sat in the pub afterwards thinking, if I'd entered a picture like some of those into competition would the judge slate it (I think he would) or love it!  perhaps I need to create one and try it out!  I also should try some of these international competitions as they pay money to winners!

Other news, after an initial fright, (kept crashing) the new PC is running well, really quiet and fast.  For any techies reading this,  its based on an Intel i7 2600k chip, has 8 gb Ram, and is overclocked to 4.7Ghz!  this means that it can calculate Pi to 1 million places in 7 secs (the old one was 23 seconds if it didn't fall over).  I've also fitted a fast graphics card that Photoshop can use to speed things up.

Want to test yours? download SuperPi here, SuperPi

Once I've reloaded all the software I can have a look at the pictures I took in Hartlepool the other day.