Hills entries

This past weekend I had lots of fun up in the Hocking Hills. I took LOTS of pictures (over 400 for the competition, plus almost 175 more the next day at a fun wildlife photo shoot). Since it's a competition, you can only submit a limited number of photos, so that means I had to whittle my 400+ shots down to only 6. That part was NOT fun.

I'll start off by sharing the photos I submitted (click on any photo to be taken to a larger view in my Picasa web album):

Category: Abstract
Subject matter: Leaves of Dutchman's Breeches

Category: Flora
Subject matter: Round-lobed Hepatica

Category: Flora
Subject matter: Dutchman's Breeches

Category: Human Interest in Nature
Subject matter: Reflection of me in stream at Ash Cave

Category: Landscape
Subject matter: Reflection of surrounding trees in strean at Ash Cave

You are not allowed to manipulate images in any way for this competition - the photos must be submitted as they were captured in your camera. For this reason there were a lot of photos I took that I knew would be better cropped down (like photos of waterfowl that I just couldn't get close enough to). Also, I feel that even some of my entries look a little better with a flip of the "monochrome" switch:

This, however, is my favorite photo taken during the entire competition. I played around with my camera settings a lot to get this coloring.

I submitted this photo to the "Photographer's Choice" category. This category was voted on by all of the participating photographers rather than the judges, so it was a peer-based category. Any guesses as to what the subject matter might be?

Unfortunately, I did not win any prizes for my submissions. Oh well. There were almost 200 folks competing this year, so I was up against lots of other super photographers. Maybe next year!

Tomorrow I will be sharing some VERY cool bird photos I captured after the competition was over.