What's new you ask? Considering I haven't updated this since December, quite a bit...
Back in November the Edson Leader ran a contest to find a photo to place on the cover of the 2016 Edson Community Directory. Residents were invited to submit images that represented Edson and the surrounding area. The staff at the newspaper narrowed down the submissions to a final three which were posted on its Facebook page and held an online public vote to determine which image would appear on the cover. Much to my surprise, two of the final three were my submissions. Most of you reading this are likely already aware of the outcome but for those who aren't, when the directories went out to every home in the community, this image by yours truly was featured on the cover! Many thanks to the family, friends and all the other folks who took the time to vote.
Later that week I received some more good news. On October 3 The Edson Photography Club had participated in the Scott Kelby 8th Annual Worldwide Photo Walk. As part of this walk, you sign up at KelbyOne.com and along with over 1,000 other groups across the world, spend the day walking around a location of your choice taking photos. At the end of the day you submit your best image to your group leader who then picks what he or she thinks is the best image from the group. Each groups winners are then submitted to Kelby for the worldwide competition. Again, much to my complete shock, this image of mine, of some atypical graffiti at the local skate park, was selected as the winner for the Edson walk! Not surprisingly, I wasn't one of the Top 10 Finalists for the worldwide portion, but I was genuinely honoured to be part of it. The photo walk was a fun experience and I'm looking forward to participating again this fall.
Under construction for what seems like 5 years, the new Edson Hospital is finally set to open this summer! The new hospital will be a vast improvement over the current facility and comes in with a budget of $186 million. A small amount of that money was spent on purchasing images to decorate the interior of the hospital. My fellow EPC members and I submitted some of our best photos for consideration to the company tasked with the interior design and I'm extremely pleased to say that two of my photos were purchased and are going to be printed in large format and mounted to be displayed at the hospital for years to come! (Does this mean I'm now a professional photographer?!)
In celebration of the good things happening, I splurged a little and bought myself a new camera. Goodbye D5100, hello D800! I've made the switch to a full-frame sensor. Without getting into all the minutiae, let's just say this new camera is light years ahead of what I had. The photos I've been able to capture so far have silenced any buyers remorse I might have had, and I'm excited to see where my photography goes with this new tool in hand!
Anyways, thanks for reading. Hopefully it's not another five months before I update again.
Shawn