07 Dec The Sleeping Giant (shown at the Festival Nature Namur 2014)

As announced in my previous post, one of my pictures has been selected by the 2014 International Namur Nature Photography Competition.
I wanted to wait to show the image here to keep the exclusivity for those of you who were going to visit the exhibition in Namur. The Festival has now ended so here is my picture.
I did not get the 1st prize in the Landscape category with it but is was still one of the few selected in this category. In total, 141 pictures have been selected in 13 categories, from 6200 submitted images. Not bad!
If you visited the exhibition of the Competition during the first week-end of the Festival, you would not have found my picture (as I experienced it myself). A problem seems to have occurred when printing my image and this led to a delay while a new print was produced. Anyway, it was finally visible during the rest of the exhibition. When I saw it, I was a bit surprised by its size, or rather its lack thereof! I’m so used to seeing in a very large print that I found the Competition standardized print length (80 cm) very short.
Some of you who had visited my latest exhibition in June might remember this image as I had shown it there too.

This picture was taken in central Oregon, in the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument (Painted Hills Unit). I had seen pictures of this place before and I really wanted to see it by myself. I was based in Bend for a few days during my trip to Oregon a few years ago and getting to the Monument meant more than 2 hours drive. The weather when I arrived there was depressing, with low clouds and rain. I thought that I had not done this trip to go back empty handed so I started to explore the area and took a few pictures, mostly details to avoid the grey and sad sky. But just before I was going to leave at the end of the day, the sky finally cleared partially, just enough to let the end of the day sun illuminate the hills. The light was marvelous, with the sun low on the horizon bringing out all the details and colours of the ground still wet from the rain. And the dark grey clouds still present in the East gave me a nice backdrop. Even if the light was changing fast, I took the time to set up my tripod and take a series of several (vertical) images that I later combined with AutopanoPro to obtain this landscape image. Working this way allows me to print this image up to a large size with excellent quality. I had a ‘test print’ done at 180×60 cm, now hanging on a wall at home, and, each time I look at it, I still see new details that I had not noticed before.
If you want to see more images from this amazing place, have a look at my Oregon gallery.