By the end of October, I’ll know whether this photograph I captured has won the $25,000 first prize in the Hamdan Bin Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum International Photographic competition.
It’s a big call (me versus the world sort of thing) but I love the emotion of these young buddhist monks playing in a Myanmar monastery. Each monk’s expression carries an emotion – elation, envy, determination and encouragement – right down to the tiny surprised eyeball of the monk on the right. I love it; it’s one of the few personal photographs I have mounted in my own home.
And the competition is calling for submissions based around “The Challenge.”
So, I figger it has a pretty good chance (and $25,000 would get me that new equipment I’ve been looking at).
It’s the third time I’ve entered a photographic competition in my 15 year career – my first international competition. On the two other occasions, I won a national photographic magazine award for the best travel photograph and the best documentary photograph. So this is a whole different league.
We’ll see.