This year, we teamed up with the Institute of Remote Healthcare, trauma specialists MDD, Rig Medics UK and SWMUK for the 2014 Photography Contest. We were looking for striking digital photographs to celebrate medics working in remote environments. Thanks to all who entered, the images were a pleasure to look through and it was definitely a tight contest. Out of more than one hundred entries, we are proud to present the winners.
How did we judge the winners?
As we are photography geeks at Adventure Medic HQ, we like our competition judging to be as open as possible. That way, people can learn from the process, as well as understand why the winners were chosen.
For the General category, we were looking for technically sound photography with relevance to the remote medicine brief, as well as artistic flair. For students, we allowed a bit more latitude with respect to the subject matter, as we recognised that many of the entrants would just be starting their remote medicine careers.
Dr Andrew Buckley won for his image’s compelling sense of motion, wonderful texture in the clouds and its good use of blur, saturation and contrast. Andrew wins an MDD First Person On Scene Kit.
Emily Brown came second with her picture of the Machermo Porter Shelter. We liked its direct relevance to the theme, it’s skilful composition, appropriate depth of field and the lovely soft lighting and texture. Slightly increased contrast/brighter whites or a lower colour temperature might just have helped to make the red cross pop.
Finally, we liked Maarten Boersema’s bright evocative colours, expressive faces (all in focus and all looking towards the camera) and skilful framing of his image.
Amongst the student entries, Christopher Lewis won with his image of lightning over the Alps, taken on the BMRES Monte Rosa Expedition. The photograph was well composed and did well to capture the lightning, expose for the snow and the mountains, all while keeping the texture in the clouds. A Rab Superlite 2 Person Group Shelter will be winging its way to Christopher as we speak.
We appreciated Adam Gold’s photo for its composition, with the line of the blurred hand leading to the child’s eyes, which were nicely in focus. Keeping the doorframe and the woman’s belly helped to frame the image. We also liked the toning in the monochrome conversion.
Ankit Bhatt’s photo was relevant to the theme, bringing out good colours from the rock and a sense of height and steepness. Darkening the exposure of the sky would have helped to even out the image and focus the viewer’s attention on the rescuers.
Finally, Jamie Goodhart exempted himself from the student competition once he became one of the SWMUK organisers. However, we’d still like to include his image of Collins Bay in Antarctica for its beauty, stillness and clarity.
Commended
Congratulations also to Alice Collishaw, William Davies, Lucy Dickinson and Annemarie Esler for entering some great photos that came very close to winning.
