I’ve only entered two photography contests since I started shooting at about the age of eleven or twelve and there weren’t any prizes except the glory of having my photography featured on a wall or small time local news, but I’m proud of putting myself out there when I was extremely introverted and. Also, winning two for two ain’t bad, time to enter another one!
Cold sun down a bridge
I took this photograph while driving my blind father around when I was fourteen. He’d lent me his Canon TLb, the first SLR 35mm camera I’d ever used. He knew how much I loved taking pictures on the simple little (‘toy’) Kodak Instamatic camera I’d gotten for Christmas a year or two prior and having heard about a local photography contest he encouraged me to shoot a roll, the first I’d probably shot on a 35mm. I submitted this picture and won first place and was featured on the local news. It’s not the most marvelous picture but folks, I was only 14 (something I do recall as that’s when I was able to drive on a special learners permit) and to be fair this was back in the days of film where one couldn’t take a hundred shots and there was no photo editing software, just one camera, one lens, and one roll of film. I think the composition was good, the subject matter is interesting, and I like the lens flares (something I continue to allow to sneak into my photography). Not too bad for my first roll on a ‘big boy’ camera, eh?
Color version:
Black and white version:
A love to last and loose
I entered my second contest when I was twenty or twenty one while living in Eugene, Oregon. The scan I had for over 30 years was one I likely made around 1996 on an underpowered Mac on a low res scanner in the University of Oregon library and it had to be small enough to fit on an old school floppy disk. Fortunately, I recently found the negatives, blew this up in a dark room, then scanned it. Sometimes you gotta love a hoarding mentality!
For those that are curious here’s the scan I’ve been holding onto for decades:
