Queensland Professional Photographer of the Year

We are regular entrants to professional photography awards. The process of curating (or creating) work for the awards is pretty intense, and the activities you go through genuinely trickle over to client work and help you to be a better photographer. Of course you strive for your images to receive awards, and when they do it’s quite exciting. If fortune (aka the judging panel) really favours you, you might end up as a finalist or a category winner, and I’ve been lucky enough for the wind to blow my way a few times in that regard. But this year…

It’s been a particularly challenging couple of months, and I didn’t have the discipline to work through Illustrative work as I normally would. (20+ hours per image? Nope.) So this year I stuck my neck out in a few different directions. I entered four client images in the Commercial category, and was pleased to be a finalist in the Commercial division. I also entered four images from my travels in Singapore and Denver, photographs I shot for fun and for the challenge of it; those four went in to the Travel category. Not only did they win me the title of 2019 Queensland Epson Professional Travel Photographer of the Year, they also snagged me…

2019 Queensland Epson Professional Photographer of the Year!!! This is the big one.

You kind of think maybe someday you might have a shot at a title like this. When you look back at the names on the (gigantic) trophy, there are legends on there like Kelly Brown, Peter Rossi, Marcus Bell, William Long… it’s covered in royalty. So I was not prepared to hear my name called out at the end. Seeing your name engraved alongside that royalty is something else.

It’s quite the honour to represent the Queensland finalists. Some of my favourite photographers in the world were announced as finalists on the night. Huge congratulations to all of the finalists – Mark Duffus (Commercial), Mick Porter (Documentary), Selena Rollason (Family), Robyn Finlayson (Illustrative), Frances Suter (Landscape), Natarsha Marsh (Newborn), Renee Doyle (Pet/Animal), Forough Yavari (Portrait), Murray Redpath (Wedding), and Troy Lum (Student) and Afshin Jafari (Emerging). Special shoutout to Afshin and Forough, who between them took home more glass than anyone!! You can see the full list of category winners and their images, as well as the finalists names, at the Queensland awards page.

Success in something like this is never a solo effort. There are so many people to thank.

Thank you to Tristam Evison of EV Photo for his exquisite prints. I’ve been printing my own for a little while, but this year I suddenly aged five decades and slipped a disc a few weeks before the awards deadline, which threw my preparation in to disarray. An emergency callout to Tristam and he swung in to action, printing and matting all of my work for me. We had a few discussions about paper choices, and I’m sure he would have agreed with my opinion if it was right 🙂 and in the end Tristam’s guidance paid dividends. (As an added bonus… thanks to a stuffup with the courier company, my Travel prints journeyed from northern NSW, to country Victoria, back to NSW, then the Gold Coast, before arriving in Brisbane in the nick of time. Maybe that’s the secret to high scoring travel images!)

The state awards are sponsored by Epson, and that’s who I trust my printing to. I’ve been printing with Epson for years. I have my eye on a printer now and I wouldn’t look anywhere else. My awards prints have been printed on Canson for the last few years too, and that paper always delivers. Before I get anywhere near printing though, I do post production using my EIZO monitor, and OMG that makes such a difference. I’ve definitely seen an improvement in the fidelity of my work when I work using an EIZO.

Massive thanks to the Queensland Council and the AIPP Awards folks who work extremely hard to run the awards each year. Particular shoutout to Gary Cranitch, Chairman of Jurors, who kept everything running smoothly on the weekend of judging despite some occasional excitement and hiccups.

I am privileged to have a posse of eagle-eyed photographer friends that look over my work and point out flaws or weaknesses that I might want to address before my work is shown to judges. Colleen, Fiona, Karen, Karen, Ben, Matt, and a few others that occasionally throw rocks at my prints – thank you all. I super appreciate your guidance and I hope I can repay the favour.

BIggest of thanks to my family – Wanda, Bailey and Tara. You guys are everything, especially when things are tough, and 2019 is the toughest yet. I wouldn’t be able to stand, literally or figuratively, without you guys holding me up.

 

Spoiler Alert! The four travel images are right at the bottom of this blog post… If you’re an APPA judge and you don’t want to see them, maybe stop now. 🙂

As you can see, you couldn’t wipe the smile off of my face 😀