First place
Second place
Third place
The Photo Club of Quail Creek continued with its monthly members contest with December being an “open” topic. Each club member could enter up to three photos taken in the last three years. This subject proved to be very appealing and drew 43 entries. All of the photos can be seen on our Flickr site: https://www.flickr.com/photos/129343350@N08/sets/72157704279624871.
Helen Phillips won first place with her photo Essence of Cactus. Helen commented, “My photo was taken April 20, 2018 when the Photo Club visited the Tucson Botanical Gardens. It was originally a cluster of three pink cactus flowers (one of my favorite colors). I’ve never done much with black and white, but in the November issue of Outdoor Photography, there was an article about converting color files to black and white in Lightroom. Following the author’s instructions, I experimented with several different types of photos, including the cactus. When I cropped it down to just the one blossom, it suddenly struck me as the essence of the cactus beauty and was very satisfying to me.” Helen shot this with a Sony ILCE-6000, a 16-50 mm lens, focal length of 50 mm, 1/400 sec at f/9.0, ISO 400. The photo was post processed with Adobe Lightroom Classic.
Monte Hudson took second place with her photo Antelope. Monte commented, “The photo was shot in Yellowstone National Park (just as we entered the park from Gardner, Montana) where, for years, we have gone to photograph the wildlife. Antelopes are such beautiful subjects, hard to take a bad photo of them. No processing other than cropping.” The camera was a Canon EOS Rebel with a Tamron 18-400 lens. The photo was at a focal length of 400 mm, f/6.3, 1/500 sec, ISO 200.
The photo Watchful Eye by Curt Dailey placed third. Curt said, “The photo was taken during an early springtime walk near Bangor, Maine. The mother duck appears napping, but in truth had an eye on her babies. The way they were lined up, ducks all in a row, was attention grabbing. Cropping was the only post-processing.” Curt used a Samsung Galaxy Note 4 to capture this. The photo was shot at f/2.2, focal length of 31 mm.
The Photography Club of Quail Creek has a monthly photo contest for its members and also schedules numerous photo field trips for members throughout the year. Meetings are held the second Wednesday of the month at 7:00 p.m. at the Kino Conference Center, Mesquite Room. Room venue could vary each month. Consult the club’s constantly updated website http://www.pcqc.org as well as the weekday HOA What’s Happening for additional information.