"Capture Your Downtown" Photography Contest 2022
Today we announce the winner of this year’s Capture Your Downtown Photography Contest!
After close consideration, it was decided that Richard Jones was the winner for 2022!
Here is Richard’s statement:
Museum Staircase - Richard Jones
I’ll be straight up – I take a lot of photos and most of them are bad. I delete those quickly, and usually before anyone else sees them, however the worst photo I ever took didn’t get deleted. It was taken was during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2007 and I thought it would be interesting to take a selfie using the camera itself to block the sun, a bit like a camera-eclipse. The result was me and my then girlfriend (now wife) squinting terribly into the camera with a weird shadow of my hand and camera laying across our pained faces. This photo was archived in a special album called “What The Hell Were You Thinking?”. I don’t mind taking bad photos because I like to try different things, to take different photos, and when you have that mindset a lot of photos will be bad.
Some photos I take I know are going to be decent, and really they should be if there is an attractive scene in front of me – an amazing sunset, the perfect by-chance composition of a colourful tree, or a stunning lookout. It is good to see these photos turn out well, but I also know they should be decent, so usually I’m just relieved that I didn’t mess up the exposure, or leave something odd-looking in the background.
My favourite moments as a photographer though happen when a photo takes me by surprise, when I see one I didn’t expect to be decent, a photo that was taken almost as an afterthought. When this happens I get a real “woah, look at that” feeling, and often stare at the photo for minutes and keep returning to it over the next hour. The photo of the Museum staircase is one of these.
I took the photo in June 2022, when I was there to gather content of the Museum for Tourism. I took a lot of photos that day of pretty much every nock and cranny of the building. It was towards the end of the shoot and I was heading downstairs. I thought the scene looking down the staircase looked interesting to the eye so I grabbed a few shots. I was fortunate enough to have a colleague walking ahead and I asked her to walk a backwards and forwards a couple of times so I could get good composition of her roughly in the middle of the stairway – in Tourism we like to have a person in the shot as much as possible. After I took the shot I moved on and didn’t think much of it until a few days later.
I like the shot because… well I just like it. I think it possibly meets the ‘rule of thirds’, the ‘golden ratio’, some framing rule and possibly some rule about primary colours, but to be honest I don’t think that following any of these photography ‘rules’ necessarily makes a good shot a good shot, I just think my shot ended up as a ‘good shot’.
My ‘golden ratio’ rule is more like this: That day I took around 500 photos. I later whittled them down to 83 useable ones, of which 10 are quite nice and luckily for me on this occasion, 1 was really nice. That’s about normal for my golden ratio – 500:83:10:1.
Thank you for the award! It means a lot to me. The Soo is a beautiful place. Some of its beauty is right in front of us, some is a bit more hidden. Finding some of this slightly more hidden beauty feels good.”
Richard
Camera model: NIKON Z 6_2
Lens: NIKKOR Z 24-120mm f/4 S
Focal length: 24.0 mm
Shutter speed: 1/60 s
Aperture: f/4.5
ISO: 2800
Richard Jones is the Marketing Specialist for Tourism Sault Ste. Marie. His photographic work can be seen on their social media and website!
Thank you to everyone who submitted their beautiful photos, our judge Peter Smith, and a BIG thank you to Camera Craft for sponsoring the contest.