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We are the Champions my friends

For those of you who don’t live in Brevard County, Amy and I recently entered a photo contest hosted by Florida Today, the local newspaper. The contest was associated with a photography exhibit at the Brevard Museum of Art, which featured Annie Leibovitz portraits of women. As such, the contest theme was “Women”. Fortunately for me, I am married to a woman, so we set out trying various shots. We ended up with this:

Amy has gotten a lot of flack for the photo, presumably because you can’t see her clothes. For the record, yes she is in bed in this photo and fully clothed. Her shoulder just happens to be hiding her shirt strap.

That being said, this was exactly the expression we were trying to get. Amy has this thing she does when she does something embarrassing, cute, or any number of other things. She will hide behind whatever is available, be it a blanket, hair, her hands, whatever, and slowly peaks out. That is pretty much what is going on here.

Technically speaking, the photo was taken with my new Canon XSi with a 50mm F/1.8 lens. I was also using a 430 EX II top-mounted flash that I recently bought from the soon-to-be-gone Circuit City. Other than the conversion to Black and White, the only other editing was a slightly lightening of her eye which was shadowed a bit too much.

As most everyone in Brevard already knows, we won first prize in the judged half of the contest which was fun. This basically amounts to a big photo in the paper and a year membership to the museum. The article in the paper also had a short interview from me:

Our judging panel included Steven Maklansky (the incoming president of the Brevard Art Museum), Malcolm Denemark and Pam Harbaugh (yours truly, arts writer and theater critic for FLORIDA TODAY).

Coming in first among the judges was Jonathan Goforth, 28, of Merritt Island. He used a Canon Rebel XSi, a 50 mm lens and a top-mounted 43 EX2 flash to take this photograph of his wife, Amy.

“We took a whole bunch of pictures. Probably 30 or 40 for this one. . . . It’s her expression, something she does. I find it very cute. I shot it on that white fabric, it just
stood out better. I guess the skin tone, the colors, seemed distracting to me. Her face got framed in the pure white of the fabric. It made it stand out better to me.”

He said his visit to see the Leibovitz exhibition expanded his view of photographic portraiture and influenced his own work.