Famous photographer Ansel Adams once said, “A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.”
For Christine Cook, that is exactly what she had in mind while creating her 2016 Sunset Award winner, “Retreat,” pictured at left.
“As I was wandering through various options in my creative exploration, I felt myself going inside deeper and deeper — inside the shell and inside my own ethereal being” she says.
Photographer Ben Tanzer may have left a theater degree behind, but he certainly kept his flair for the dramatic. In his “Identity Series,” he transforms himself into iconic characters, for self-portraits like “The Boxer,” a grungy interpretation with 1920’s style that recently won the Sunset Print Award at the Plymouth Center for the Arts Fine Art of Photography.
The conceptualized image is a clear shout out to Cindy Sherman-esque photo and editing work. “I’ve always been drawn to Cindy Sherman — she was one of my first crushes ever, as a photographer,” Tanzer says. “The Boxer was my first piece for the Identity Series … I just became really interested in what it means to be human … and how we define ourselves by what it is that we do.”
For the competition print, Tanzer did some Photoshop work with overlays and brushes to create the gritty look, but says, “I don’t do a lot of what I call ‘liposuction editing.’ Just dodging and burning to emphasize certain areas.”
It’s a technique that he perfected in the second of the Identity Series in which he portrays a female karaoke singer in a low-cut, cleavage-bearing red dress.
The final competition print of “The Boxer” was a 9-by-9-inch square “Instagram cut,” as he calls it, that fit the mood of his self-portraits, thanks to the self-involved, “selfie” flavor the crop provided. The image was printed on Epson Cold Press Bright White 100% cotton rag paper.
While Tanzer, currently a production assistant for a Texas animation studio, has participated in photography shows for eight years, he’s been entering print competitions for just two years, and is looking to do more.
“There are a whole bunch of competitions out there,” he says. “And there are a lot of people around the country who care about this as much as I do.”
When New Orleans photographer Yvette Ponthier first learned about print competitions, she was initially turned off by what seemed to be subjective judging and nitpicking. “I saw these beautiful images just being picked apart,” she says. “So I said, nope, not doing that. That was the biggest mistake I ever made.”
Four years ago, she changed her mind and began competing with images like “And They Left Their Boats in Search of Him,” at left, which won the Sunset Print Award at the 2015 Southern Pro Exposure Competition sponsored by Professional Photographers of Louisiana.
“Print competitions totally make you more creative in every aspect,” Ponthier says. “I should have stuck with competition because being an active participant has taken my photography skills to levels I never thought possible.”
With his portrait photography work, Shelby, N.C., photographer Randy McNeilly is no stranger to delivering images with deep storytelling. Case in point: “The Colonel in Twilight,” above, a stunning portrait of a Vietnamese military man that won not only the Sunset Print Award and Best of Show at the PPA Southeast District print competition with a perfect 100 score, but was also awarded third place in the National Sunset Print Award last month.
By all accounts, Jeff Gulle should have been a doctor. But one of his sisters, who was also studying medicine, convinced him to follow his passion … and that’s what eventually led him to the world of photography. He started working on the yearbook and newspaper staff in school, and kicked off a career in photojournalism.
After mastering medical photography and covering crime scenes, he eventually ran a highly successful portrait studio before “retiring” eight years ago to go to work as the photography program director at North Georgia Technical College. Today, he shoots for the love of it, he says. And that certainly shows in his award-winning work, like “Skylake,” pictured above, which won the 2015 Sunset Print Award at the Georgia Professional Photographers Association annual competition.
You submitted nearly 100 entries in our #SunsetWorks contest through our website, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages, and we were thrilled to see all the different ways you make Sunset work for you. Just take a look at the gallery below to see some of the creative and beautiful ways Sunset’s line of fine art and production papers and canvases make images come to life. We were happy to see that a few of you jumped into the pictures, too!