Everyone who knows me will probably attest to the fact I’m pretty blase about a lot of things in life – I tend to go with the flow and am not too concerned about the details, aka ‘titles’.
Where am I going with all of this? I enter a few competitions each year, a lot of them are overseas competitions as I like to throw myself into the deep end, literally! I find the number of entries into the overseas competitions are mind blowing and I enter with very little thought to actually winning, it’s more about the experience of preparing images for competitions.
In November 2014 I made a last minute entry into the Monochrome Awards 2014 and then promptly forgot all about it. Last weekend I logged into the Monochrome Awards website to start my entries for 2015 and I was very surprised to see that I had actually received an honorable mention in the last awards. The awards were judged in January 2015. You can stop shaking your head now, I know I’m very blase about these things!
A little bit of background to this image: I shot this image in November 2013 at Fort Lytton in Brisbane during a creative photography weekend. A creative day/weekend is when a group of photographers, models, hair and make-up artists all come together and create images that they possibly don’t normally get to ‘shoot’ in their day to day work. The Fort Lytton weekend was primarily organised by me – I liaised with Fort Lytton and pulled together a group of HMUA’s, models and fellow photographers. Fort Lytton is an amazing venue for photography and I know I want to go back there one day soon. The model in this shot, is beautiful Aesha Sylla, the author of a newly released book titled Kaleon and an amazing young woman who is definitely making her mark in this world. I love photographing Aesha, we’ve worked together before and we always have a lot of fun. The lovely and talented, Tami Perrin of Gold Coast Professional Hair Dresser & Make Up Artist was Aesha’s hair and make-up artist for this shoot.
I enter awards/competitions in order to continually push myself creatively, improve my photography and to receive feedback from varied sources. Photography awards/competitions are very interpretive, some times you can enter the exact same image into 4 different competitions and receive 4 very different results – in a way, that’s what I love about photography, it’s totally subjective to the audience it’s in front of. I’m telling you this as I had entered different versions (edits) of this image into 2 previous competitions: The 2013 International Loupe Awards, where it received a Bronze Award and then I entered it into the 2014 Queensland AIPP Epson Awards where it received ‘professional standard’ score but no award. I re-edited the image for a third time and decided to enter it into the Monochrome Awards 2014, however with Christmas, New Year and my kids starting school again I promptly forgot I’d entered. I guess they expect people to log onto their accounts to check the results?! To my knowledge, only the winners (first, second & third) are contacted for verification and the Honorable Mentions are notified via their accounts.
Here is the press release that has been waiting for me for 4 months!
Here is the image awarded Honorable Mention in the Monochrome Awards 2014:
If you’d like to see all the winners and Honorable Mentions please click here.
And for interest sake, here is the original image I submitted and was awarded in the 2013 International Loupe Awards: 
Thanks for reading and until next time, have a great day.
Sheryn Ellis
Gold Coast Portrait Photographer
“For the love of light”
