The first two rounds of judging in the prestigious Travel Photographer of the Year awards have been completed, and it was great to receive notification this morning that  four FIVE (recent update) of Chris’s eight entries made it into the list of finalists.  (Final competition winners are announced in December).

The travel photography awards are an open competition for amateur and professional photographers of any age world-wide, and are seen as the premier awards for travel photography.

This year’s categories included portfolio entries in People Watching, Wild Planet and Journeys, two single image categories (One Shot and First Shot), a New Talent category, the Young Travel Photographer of the Year Award, the Conde Nast Traveller award and also a HD video category called Travel Shorts.  Cutty Sark sponsor the overall winner award with a £5000 prize package.

If you have often hummed and hawed about entering photographic competitions my advice is to only pick a few to enter each year (or even every other year), enter only those competitions of relevance to your work (or to the kind of work you wish to be doing), look for a competition with good international recognition or naming sponsors, and always read the terms and conditions very carefully.  Be very, very wary of competitions where they grasp full rights to your imagery as part of the terms of entry.

If you choose carefully, winning a prestigious competition (or even being included as a finalist) within the realm of work you wish to be recognised in can be great PR for your business, and can also give you some well deserved confidence in your work.  (You photographers all seem to be a sensitive lot)!

In fact Photo Awards are a subject close to my heart at the moment as I’ve just spent the last month working on the final details of a new Travel Photography Competition we are involved in which will be launched sometime next  month.  I won’t say much more for now (other than the main prize has something to do with Tahiti), but definitely watch this space as it is going to be very exciting!!

Chris’s finalist images in the 2012 TPOTY Awards:

“Elephants” Portfolio entry in the Wild Planet category.

Single images each entered in the One Shot Water category.

Cheetahs selected from a portfolio entry, as finalist in “Best single image from a portfolio”.

I guess we’ll know how he got on sometime next month!!