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.

Shooting the Hills

Well folks, today is the day. The Shoot the Hills photo competition will officially begin at 1pm today, and will run for 24 hours. Then we will have until 4pm on Saturday to select the photos we want to enter, copy them onto our submission CD and turn them into the judges. Then we get to wait 24 more hours until the awards ceremony at 4pm on Sunday.

I plan to kill some of those 24 hours of waiting by taking pictures of raptors and other critters at the nature center late Saturday afternoon, and kayaking on Lake Logan with Dave early Sunday.

The weather forecast sounds next to perfect, and I'm looking forward to getting out there and capturing some great nature photos.

I'll surely have plenty of images to share from the weekend come early next week. I'll get caught up with you then!


The artist in her element