Professional Photographer of the Year awards 2012

You read that right folks! Much to my surprise, amazement and joy I was announced as a category winner in the Professional Photographer of The Year awards 2012 at their awards evening on Thursday night. What a buzz!

The image you see above was my winning photo. As you can guess the last thing that I would have imagined as I was taking it was that I’d be stood there that night, award in hand talking about the shot to an enthralled crowd of my peers. I think I was more nervous doing that than I was creating the photo. But you’ll have to stay tuned, as that’s another story.

The most surprising part of the whole experience for me though was having such a diverse and different style of photograph winning the category ahead of some incredibly strong images (that I personally had pegged as winners.) The likes of which would usually exemplify the finest use of the humble 50mm lens as an engaging portrait lens. So I’d like to personally congratulate Tina Eisenkraetzer and Lucia Eggenhoffer on their respective 2nd and 3rd place images in the category, I absolutely loved your images.

Another massive congratulations to the winner of the wedding category Martin Beddall who took the overall win, I couldn’t not think of a more deserving image.

Now to have some rest… Had to fix a flat tyre on the late drive home from the awards, and spent 14hrs the following day shooting a fantastic wedding.

Happy Easter!

Mike