I completely forgot to mention anything about this, so I figured I would for posterity. There’s a local non-profit that holds photo contests to raise funds/awareness of other local non-profits. First place in their contests is a D90 (the new version of my current camera), so I had been watching them for a while, entertaining the idea of entering one of their contests. Every time it came down to it though, I’d choke and not shoot anything. Finally, after three or four of their contests in which I was not impressed with the winners, I decided “I can win this contest,” and set out to win it.

The theme was “fruits of our labors.” I originally came up with some bullshit like an aged hand pulling an apple off a tree. Stupid, yes, but judges like that sort of dumb shit. I talked about it with Cameron a bit and he had the idea of having this guy in our building eat a peach, and take pictures of that. I approached the guy, Tom, about it, and he was flattered that I wanted to take his picture. Tom’s got a very rugged Clint Eastwood sorta look to him, so I figured it’d work well. Unfortunately, we put it off until we were out of peach season, so we had to settle on a pear, which didn’t work as well. I liked the results when I got home, but when it came time to actually submit it to the contest, I again choked, decided it wasn’t good enough, and almost didn’t enter again. I finally opted to just submit it, though I was no longer really proud of it, and waited to see what happened.

I didn’t win. I got an “honorable mention” just underneath the terrible third place entry, but it netted me a $75 check, so I’m not complaining. I bought Tom a nice cigar for his help. The entry has been sitting over on my Flickr for a while (though it’s a slightly different edit), so you’ve probably seen it, but I thought I’d write this up to make it official.