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What’s better than coming first in a contest filled with amazing photography from talented photographers and judged by experts in the field? Coming first and third!

This is just a quick post before I blog a wedding later today to say that the International Society of Professional Wedding Photographers spring contest results came in this morning and I got third overall – yay! My images placed in several categories there and the overall placing reflects a total score. The entries and standard of photography there is absolutely incredible and I feel very privileged to have placed so well. That said, I plan to pull out all the stops and completely kick butt next time!

If you are not a wedding or portrait photographer you are probably wondering what the WPPI 16×20 Print Contest is all about. Well, as far as wedding and portrait photography contests go, this is the biggy. It is an international contest and thousands of photographers from all over the world send in thousands of images for live judging by a panel of very highly-regarded photographers over the course of a week. Something to note is that this is not just an image contest, because this involves getting the best prints possible. Getting great prints that show the images well under the harsh competition lights is really a whole separate skill set and most photographers rely on pro labs to do this for them. In my case I printed all of my images myself, so I was in control from the very beginning of the image creation to the final product. Wait, let me just pat myself on the back. There. I feel good now.

Anyways, I’m happy to say that I received eight Accolades of Excellence awards for the images I submitted. Yay! Here are the images below, roughly in chronological order, with the most recent ones at the bottom.

Bride.ca has just released the Honourable Mentions of their 2009 contest and we placed there, too. In fact, out of the 35 images six of them are ours! Yay us!

Since I didn’t submit any of our photos myself, it is interesting to see the images of ours that their judges chose. A big criteria for them was whether or not an image looked like it was distinctly wedding-y.

Their website says: “What we ultimately looked for was . . . is this a great photo or a great wedding photo? Unfortunately this meant that some incredible photographs did not make the cut, because they could have been anywhere, not necessarily at a wedding.”

This is kind of funny for me to read—and I don’t mean that sarcastically!—because I often deliberately distance myself from creating images that look wedding-y. This is especially true with the more fashion-based ideas that I come up with. I sometimes get inspiration from music photography and movie posters and I try to create a similar sort of commercial or cinematic vibe to my wedding photography—something that looks larger than life and out of the ordinary.

Anyways, I thought I’d comment on the images they chose to give a bit of a story behind each photo. So, for the first time on the blog I present to you: Captions!

This image was tricky to capture! It was taken on a small yacht on Okanagan Lake in Kelowna and the poor girl was sea-sick from the rocking of the boat. I was crouched up the very front of the boat holding a flash in one hand and my camera in the other, trying to frame the shot without getting any clutter in the background, or going blind from having the sun in the viewfinder, or falling over the side. I have two images of this setup and this is one of them. It pays to get it right the first time.