2015 Photographs of the Year
On May 6, 2015 Stamford Photography Club held it’s annual Photograph of the Year competition. Members were asked to submit 2 images in Black & White Print, Color Print and Digital Image categories for a chance to be crowned our 2014-2015 Photograph of the Year. The images members submitted were shown throughout this competition season, and could be from the open subject or assigned subject categories. Our judges were tasked with selecting one image per category to represent the Stamford Photography Club as the Photograph of the Year.
Our judges for this evening were Ron Lake, Lee Paine, and Jay Wilson.
Presenting our 2015 Photographs of the Year and a comment from the winning photographer.
Note, click on the image to view larger
Black & White Print of the Year
SPC Black & White Print of the Year 2015
Tough Day by Jean-Marc Bara
Stockholm, August 2014.
My wife and I had just finished seeing Sebastião Salgado’s Genesis exhibition at Stockholm’s Museum of Photography (Fotografiska) and decided to check the Museum’s café for a drink.
On entering the café I saw this after dark scene of a couple in deep conversation. The man’s body language and expression looked like he had had a very tough day. They were seated on a long table with a row of lamps overhead and one of the lamps cast a cone of light perfectly surrounding and isolating the couple form the background. Other than what was lit by those low overhead lamps, everything else was dark. A wallet and an empty bottle of beer completed the scene. As a bonus, through the window on the left one could see the lights of the Gröna Lund theme park across from the Saltsjön bay.
I quickly snapped a candid shot hoping that the camera’s automatic exposure would manage a good compromise between the closely lit hand and head of the man and the very dark surroundings. When I worked on the image in Photoshop I had to burn those hot spots in order to recapture some detail.
Technical: Photographed with a Sony a6000 (crop sensor) with a zoom lens set at 70mm. Exposure f4, 1/40s, ISO 3200. – Jean-Marc
Color Print of the Year
SPC Color Print of the Year 2015
Arriving or Departing by Jean-Marc Bara
Paris, August 2014.
This image is a tiled composite of nine photographs of the same jetway section at Paris’ CDG airport. A few days prior, I had made photographs of sets of windows with interesting reflections that I intended to use for our Club’s “Geometrics” Assigned Subject. So, the grid pattern was fresh in my mind. When I saw passengers walking on the jetway, I immediately visualized tiling several shots of the same section. I stationed myself comfortably on a chair near the window overlooking the jetway and shot every time I liked the composition framed by that jetway section.
I shot about 70 photographs, some with a single passenger, some with couples and some with larger groups, but all on the same small section of the jetway. In these days of heightened airport security I was sure that a security guard would eventually stop me from systematically shooting the stream of passengers boarding a plane, as my actions looked more like deliberate documentation than casual shooting. To my surprise no one objected.
Back home, I selected the photographs and played with the position of the tiles until I was pleased with the overall balance between pattern and randomness. In doing so I found I needed a tile with no passenger in it but I had forgotten to shoot one without passengers, so I cloned an empty tile in Photoshop.
Because the late afternoon light changed gradually during the half an hour or so I shot the photographs, I also had to take into account the progression from lighter to darker in tiling the composite.
Regarding the title, all selected subjects are departing passengers, with the exception of the two airport employees pushing the wheelchairs at the opposite corners of the composite. Also, all passengers look like they have a chest-out military posture, when in fact they are leaned back as they are descending a slight incline.
Technical: Photographed with Sony a6000 (crop sensor) and a zoom lens set at 70mm. Exposure f4, 1/800s, ISO 100. – Jean-Marc
Digital Projected Image of the Year
SPC Digital Projected Image Photo of the Year 2015
Prized Possession by Rosemarie Consunji
This child is a member of the Aeta tribe, an indigenous people of the Philippines who live in a mountainous and isolated area north of Manila. I took this photo when I joined the Land Rover Club of the Philippines on one of their charitable missions into the impoverished Aeta communities. The villages we visited were full of very friendly children but this particular girl struck me for two reasons: 1) she was holding a doll with blonde hair and I wondered if she had ever seen a real person with blonde hair; and, 2) she was gripping the doll such a way that I knew that she would never let go of it. – Rosemarie
