My Results – Focus Awards 2017

Gold Award in Landscape Category.

This year for the first time I entered the Focus Awards.  I believe that they started out as Flickr and Facebook groups for landscape photographers and have just gone from strength to strength over the years supporting and nurturing a budding fellowship of photographers.  

This years awards were judged by three of Australia’s better know photographers Tony Hewitt, Christian Fletcher and Peter Eastway and do those guys deserve medals!  Picking out the winning images amongst all of the great photographs submitted, and I’m just talking about the top fifty in each category that I’ve seen.  If you have the time, please head on over to the results page and see for yourself.  The open section is open to amateurs and professionals while the other categories are open to just amateurs.

I entered two images in each of the Landscape, B&W, Seascapes, Urban Landscapes, Sunrise & Sunset categories.  I came away with one Gold award (3rd Place), 6 Silver awards and 3 Bronze awards, I’ll include images of the Gold and Silvers below.  One of the great things about this competition is that we receive feedback on our images.  They are just standardised comments but they give a good indication of the primary item that is lacking in taking your image to the next level.

While the comments on my images were quite varied for the majority of the images, one thing that was mentioned 3 times was my composition.  Something that I will definitely have to work on.  The majority of the other comments noted were in my development of the images.  Things like tonal control, midtone contrast, more contrast etc.  I’ll be reprocessing these images now, with these things in mind and hopefully will see an improvement.

Thanks to all those in the Focus Facebook group for your support and a big thank you to the Focus committee, the judges and the sponsors.