"Relations" recognized

So I found out last week that an online gallery of mine took a third place in the Best of Photojournalism (BOP) contest. This was very cool for me, as I have never placed in any of the larger competitions before (ie: POYi, BOP, World Press), which I've been entering for years. I know third place isn't a big deal to some, but it's nice to have something from our little paper register on the bigger stage.

What I think is kinda funny about this is, I entered this gallery as almost an afterthought. I had worked for WEEKS putting together my entries for the POYi and BOP this year. Scrutinizing, overanalyzing, spending WAY too much late night time on this endeavor. SO when it came time to submit my still photo entries I figured, what the heck, why not enter a couple of my online projects too?

It can definitely give you a little boost if you win and give you a little twinge of self doubt when you don't. None of my stills registered with the judges from either big contest this year, but I'm thrilled with what I got, it's a nice honor. It's especially nice to win in the gallery category, which is all about the images, not audio or other non-photography elements.

You can check out the contest page here, which links to the gallery.

You can also read a little thing about it here, on our Website.

The piece was called Rod Run Relations and was a series of diptych photos that juxtaposed the people at the car show with the cars. It was one of my favorite projects from this past year, though it was harder than I thought it'd be. The Rod Run is one of the events that we cover every year and is a fairly big deal around here and I really wanted to do something different with it this year. We published five of the pix on the Life page and hosted a gallery on our Web site of 10 diptychs. I got a great response from the community and had people coming up to me a saying how much they liked it for weeks ( a greater award any day). Only one person seemed to not like it and let us know by posting a disapproving comment on two different pages on our Web site and in a letter to the editor.

"I really do not like the "pictures''of the Rod Run. There
should be CARS not the backs of little girls & such ... instead there's half pictures
of the chrome on a galaxie 500 & A Hubcap!-only! I know
your out of state customers would have enjoyed seeing some of
these beautiful cars, as well as the rest of us. this is not an art
gallery contest - how about a hometown nerwspaper?! "

I sent her a letter back, explaining why I chose to shoot it this way, but never heard back unfortunately. Funny thing was, about a week later the mom of the girl in the opening pic (top) ordered a large reprint of the diptych, not just the half her daughter was in...

-DKM