This year, the school’s newspaper “The Advocate”, set a writing and photography competition for all OSC secondary students. The categories were prose, poetry and photography. I thought this would be a nice creative challenge for me, and since I am not a particularly good writer, I chose to participate by submitting one of my photos, as I am quite good in photography.

The difficulty was deciding which photo to submit. As the competition is for the newspaper’s “monsoon edition”, I thought it would be great if my photo were in some way related to the monsoon, an important weather system that shapes this part of the world significantly. Since there were no other theme specifications, I decided also to chose a picture of nature, particularly of an animal, because that is my preferred subject of photography and is connected to monsoon as well.

I went through some of the pictures I took in Sri Lanka, and decided on several roughly equally good ones. From these photos, I narrowed it down even more, until I had the following photo, which I edited slightly on Adobe Photoshop to give the final result below. Since this competition sought artistic skill, I played around more with editing than I usually do with my photos, as I generally prefer to leave them as they are to preserve how the moment I captured was truly like. Criteria for my selection were how the photo relates to “monsoon”, how artistic it is, and whether I want to use it for other things, for example, I didn’t consider photos that I might use as pieces in my Visual Arts exhibition.

The final photo I submitted.

I didn’t participate in photography competitions for a long time, although the last times I did I won great prizes, such as gift vouchers and even a camera. I think it’s both a great chance to share what I’ve been taking pictures of, and by doing so sharing part of my experiences, but it also gives me a sense of the quality of my photography as judged by others.