2021 Photograph of the Year Awards
On May 5, 2021 Stamford Photography Club held it’s annual Photograph of the Year competition virtually through Zoom as the culmination of our 2020-2021 season. Members were asked to submit 3 images across the 3 categories: Black & White Print, Color Print and Digital Image with no more than 2 images into any single category, for a chance to be crowned our 2020-2021 Photograph of the Year. The images members submitted into this competition were shown throughout the 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.
Below are the Images of the Year, along with a story behind the image from the makers.
You can see the gallery of the award winning images here.
Black & White Print of the Year
This image was captured in the summer of 2019 at the new Domino Park, along the East River in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. This park is a great addition to Williamsburg and now one of my favorite spaces. It was a hot late afternoon and many children were playing with the jets of water. The sun was coming down over Manhattan and I was playing with various backlit compositions trying to achieve some separation between the figures in that small crowd of parents and children. I had been crouched on the same spot for quite a while, just moving a little bit to the left and to the right, so that by now I was a fixture and being ignored (I looked at my file numbers and see that I made more than 400 images – many in burst mode – from that exact spot). The final element was the setting sun and I was trying to make it one additional element of the composition, but the scene was very dynamic. By luck at one point one of the adults started walking and by moving the camera slightly to the right I was able to place the sun just between his hand and body and that is the shot. As an added bonus the sun also reflected on two spots on wet ground making it a total of 3 sunspots in the composition. Digital capture, full frame camera, 35mm lens, 1/500s, f8, 500 ISO. Converted to B&W with Nick SE. ~Jean-Marc Bara
Color Print of the Year
This was taken in Bagan, Myanmar in January 2020. The 2,228 Buddhist temples, scattered over a plain near the Irrawaddy River, are over 1,000 years old. I loved the light coming through the facade of one of these temples, shining on the boy monk, who was praying. All boys and men in Myanmar must go to a monastery to study Buddhism and collect alms for the poor. The length of their time at the monastery is up to them. Many poor people in the countryside send their young boys to the cities because they can’t afford to feed and educate them. ~Emily Kelting
Digital Image of the Year
This was taken at the Milford Audubon Coastal Center, Milford, CT in June 2020. There was a dead low tide this morning which allows folks to walk well out into Long Island Sound. During low tide several tide pools are created which are feeding grounds for herons and egrets that congregate en mass. I was photographing Skimmers when I heard a ruckus rise up behind me. When I turned around a couple of Egrets got into a scrum over a tidal pool and began a joust, hopping up at each other, trying to gain the high ground over the other. This only went on for 8-10 seconds and I trained my focus on the jumping birds and captured the decisive moment where one achieved the high ground and struck the other, claiming victory as the defeated Egret moved on to another pool. ~David Henkel
