One of the unsung heroes of our camera club competition nights is the guy who moves each print in turn to the easel at the front of the hall in order for the judge to view it, critique and mark. He also has the unenviable job of reading out the title of each print to the audience. This latter task is where I am in grave danger of becoming Mrs Unpopular. A month or so ago I gave him ‘Angles in the Sky’ in my finest handwriting, which as my friends will tell you is pretty illegible at the best of times. Then I surpassed myself in last week’s Wildlife/Nature print competition by naming my image ‘Eschscholzia californica’. A tongue-twister if there was ever one. Well that was the subject’s ‘proper’ botanical name, but on reflection maybe I should just have called it ‘Poppy’ 🙂
Our next print competition is ‘Scape’ (as in landscape, cityscape, seascape) and I am already spending time on dreaming up a nice long convoluted title just to wind John up even more … Seriously though, he does a great job and our competition nights wouldn’t run half as smoothly without his assistance.
Anyway ‘Poppy’, as the image was henceforth called after the initial announcement (even by the judge which was rather amusing), did rather well for me, coming second overall in the Nature section which was pleasing. I took the photograph back in 2014 as part of a mini-project that I was doing at the time on rain. However I felt it was creative enough, a little bit different, to hopefully attract a reasonable score in this competition.
Whilst I love nature and am surrounded by it where I live, I don’t often take ‘proper’ photographs of the flowers and wildlife that I come across. I’m much more of a nature ‘snapshot wanderer’ so finding this image in my archives was a real bonus.
Image © Carol Street
