I'm a little giddy right now, and a little tipsy on cabernet savignon, so please forgive any typos or ego trips. Or ramblings.

My printed pano "PedalPower" just won Best of Show at the International Virtual Reality Photographers Association conference photography contest. There were 300+ entries.

It beat out some other amazing prints and interactive panoramas. It was not my favorite by any means, even from my own entries. It would be nice to say that it's an incredible photo. But really, I showed up at the bike club ride, had people get in a circle more or less, and snapped some photos of them. Not like I spent hours setting up the shot or waiting patiently for the light to be just right. On the contrary, it took about a minute or so, on the spur of the moment, and then I even pasted in an artificial sky because the real one was overcast and all washed out.

(By the way, yes, people were asking about that after the banquet. You can't fool all the people all the time, but the contest rules said nothing about such things and I did tell those who asked that I learned that technique at this event three years ago, and they did not seem to think it cheating.)

But mine compared to some gorgeous aerial panoramas, beautiful scenes of bridges or windmills or jetties, or volcanos, or caves? I just don't understand. All of those certainly had more effort and thought put into their composition and presentation than my bunch of people with bikes, shot quickly and uploaded to the contest just because we were allowed to enter four compositions and I had nothing better to submit.

On the other hand, some of the compositions that won in their categories were not to my liking, so maybe there's just something intangible here.

Who was it that said there's no accounting for people's taste?

Anyway, this will bring with it one or more physical prizes as well as a decent amount of publicity. I've already had the manager of the banquet hall request permission to host the panorama on the site of some kind of magazine for which he writes, as he's really a digital graphics journalist for them, he says, and he will be writing about the conference. Fine by me, and I'll post more about such things as they develop. Guess I'd better be sure Sir Round is up to the task of extra hits over the next little while.

Time for me to drink some more water and hit the sack. Tomorrow's another full day of interesting panography stuff in the morning, and a visit to Alcatraz in the afternoon. I plan to shoot panos there and enjoy the day off from work. By the way, Berkeley's a lovely place.




PedalPower: Best In Show!