I won second prize with this photo at the national City and Guilds Photography Competition - Part 1. My prize was a Fuji Finepix S1500 camera - very pleased! Even more pleased about having the picture in a photography exhibition at Morley College Art Gallery near Waterloo. It's there until closing time on Monday 26th July. There were prizes for entries in Part 2 and 3 also.
The picture is of Burnley Football Ground - Turf Moor, taken in April this year. It shows the sheer joy and delight, and large amount of money spent on advertising BFC's rise to the Premier League in 2009. There were lots of these gigantic hoardings surrounding the ground, but I concentrated on this one. You can get a feeling for the size of it, if you compare it to the traffic lights.
The poignancy and irony is that this picture was taken just a month or so before Burnley were relegated in 2010, so the elation was short lived, sadly...
Nevertheless, the impact of the images was amazing! I'm assuming they're still there. I imagine medieval cathedrals had a similar impact on congregations!
The photos in the exhibition were wonderful and inspiring. Two of my class friends also had pictures in the exhibition. Glenn had an amazing picture of exploding plastic cups of water, the action frozen as they exploded! Ric had a fabulous picture of City Hall, (the home of Boris Johnson, London's Mayor) which is an amazing sight on its own, but he shot it from a very unusual angle. I'll see if I can persuade them to allow me to show them on here...
All three of us are very grateful to Kim Lucas, our professional photography tutor, for giving us the skills to be able to do these pictures. He spent quite some time cajoling us to enter the competition in the first place! We're looking forward to studying part two photography with Kim in September, if we ever manage to finish our part one portfolios... deadline looming...
We are all studying City and Guilds Photography at CALAT, Croydon's Adult Education Institute. Thank you to my old friend Nicky Partridge who persuaded me to have a go... Nicky is a professional photographer who is in charge of the photography and creative courses at CALAT. In fact the college snapped (no pun intended!) about 6 photography awards altogether, including 1st and 3rd prizes in Part 2! Nicky's husband, Joe Partridge, who is also a professional photographer teaching at CALAT, won a national award for excellence in technology teaching in photography at the college. Nicky, Joe and Kim, (who all studied photography together as students, and are old friends) have created a wonderful digital photography studio for all those doing courses at CALAT, so we are blessed with these facilities!
Also thank you to my good friend, Jan Bennett, who accompanied me to the private view as my guest. My husband stood me up in favour of a trip to Amsterdam... (working trip though). Jan, who is a talented artist, has taken some of my photos and recreated them in beautiful pastels. I'll try to persuade her to show some on here. She also creates pastel and acrylic pictures of lots of different things, tigers, lions, Geisha Girls flower pictures including many in close up detail, and Buddhas amongst others. I think she enjoyed it! We're both just reaching the point where we can abandon our children for a few hours, now that they're old enough to be left alone, so that we can have an evening out - such liberation...!