A few weeks back, the Inter­na­tional Office here at the uni­ver­sity ran a photo com­pet­i­tion entitled “More Than Words”, to which I sub­mit­ted a few pho­tos for the dif­fer­ent cat­egor­ies. Two weeks ago, the sub­mis­sions were then exhib­ited over in the lib­rary, so Steffi and I went over and had a look. Apart from a few obvi­ous snap shots there was quite some stiff com­pet­i­tion there, and way more con­tri­bu­tions than I expec­ted. Appar­ently I’m not the only inter­na­tional stu­dent with an interest in pho­to­graphy here in Maynooth…

The award cere­mony then took place last week when I was in Ger­many, so Steffi agreed to go in my stead, not know­ing what to expect. Well, turns out one of my pho­tos (shown above) won in the cat­egory “The Best Night Out”! Awe­some! I actu­ally pre­ferred some of my other pho­tos more (I’ll try to post each entry here in the com­ing weeks), but then again, tastes are dif­fer­ent. The price for that was some uni­ver­sity mer­chand­ise and a much needed price money (to pay off my equip­ment ;-)).

But that wasn’t it. Steffi also receive another price for me — the one for the over­all best sub­mis­sions, i.e. con­cern­ing the entirety of what I had sub­mit­ted. Wow. The price for that was a small point and shoot cam­era, a red Fuji­Film FinePix Z20. Nice :-) I guess I’ll use that mainly for tak­ing small videos, and Steffi might just keep it in her hand back. Never hurts to have a small cam­era around!

So a big thank you to Karen over at the Inter­na­tional Office for organ­ising and run­ning this com­pet­i­tion, to the judges (Peter Thursfield, Irish Times Pic­ture Editor; Glen Hay­ward, Metro Pic­ture Editor; and Denis Con­don, Film Stud­ies lec­turer) who voted in favour of my pho­tos and to Steffi for going to the cere­mony! This is def­in­itely a huge boost for my pho­to­graphy and I hope this will not the last com­pet­i­tion I’ll par­take in!

PS: Tech­nical note about the pic­ture: The secret here was to use so-​called “slow sync”, that is you expose fairly long (an 8^th of a second here) with a high ISO value, but also use the flash on the second cur­tain. That way, you get a lot of motion in the shot, but also freeze some of the ele­ments at the end of the expos­ure. Same tech­nique as with the fall­ing egg the other day.