After all the preparations for the show at Kerrytown Concert House and printing the calendar, it was the last minute, week before last, when I entered the UK’s Outdoor Photography magazine’s Outdoor Photographer of the Year competition. I submitted 8 photos to each of 2 categories: At the water’s edge and Light on the land.

This photograph, Waiting for you by the lake was submitted to At the water’s edge and I learnt the yesterday that it had been shortlisted!

Which is wonderful news. Shouldn’t get too carried away though; it’s true that there was something like 12,000 photographs submitted, but there are still 1143 photos total on the shortlist, from 365 photographers; and some photographers were getting between 9 and 20 shortlisted.

Given the last minute nature of the submission, it was done without the help of my editor and the selected photograph is not on any of my websites, hence attaching it here. The photograph is from a couple of years ago when we were staying with my wife’s cousin at her cottage on Lake Michigan. I was having a walk after breakfast. There was another chair on the other side of the tree, and I tried more versions of that, but this is my favorite. This tree was at the bottom of their garden, with a short cliff down to a very narrow beach. I wrote to tell her and she said that the tree, along with the chairs, is no longer there – they had to remove it because they are forever losing land to the lake and there was a risk of the tree pulling a lot of land in with it.

You can see all of the shortlist at the OPOTY website, though you do have to create a login to do so.