Guilty as Charged

Our photo-hosting provider, Smugmug, has a pretty popular forum called Dgrin (or Digital Grin - Smugmug's logo is a grin...) in which photographers can get advice about gear, techniques, and all other things photography. Every now and then they host a "Mini Challenge" in which a forum user chooses a photo theme for a contest, and everyone can enter 3 photos pertaining to that theme. The winner gets to choose the theme for the next contest, judges the winners, and so on.

Being relatively new to the forum, I came across my first challenge about a month ago with the topic "Animal Attitude" which judged the photo's ability to show an animal's attitude, but also had to have solid photographic elements such as composition, lighting, etc. On a whim I scrambled through the PTG animal photos and made 3 selections. I thought at the least it would get us some exposure.

The contest ended on the last day of September, but I forgot to check the results...until today. And I was shocked to see that "Guilty as Charged" nabbed 2nd place out of hundreds of submissions! What does this mean for us? Well, not much. But it's great to get recognized and receive positive feedback about your photos. Here is what the judge said of the photo:

SECOND PLACE...
photosthatgive - Guilty as Charged
An attitude of guilt or shyness is on this dog's face and the composition of cropping, sepia tone, the moody lighting and depth of field is great! Bringing into focus the eyes which scream the theme! I personally would have cloned out the shiney tag on the dog's collar but no big deal.

Little does he know we don't use Photoshop and I wouldn't know the first thing about cloning out a dog collar. All the more reason to be proud of ourselves - we're beating out the Photoshoppers with our raw photos! (P.S. I took this photo indoors, handheld, in poor lighting when I was just learning how to use my first dSLR.)

I'll bask in this one for about 5 more minutes, then I have to go to work.