Amateur photographers receive prizes

The winners of The Irish Times amateur photographer of the year competition received their prizes yesterday.

Chosen from almost 10,000 entries, the 20 winners captured “something visually striking, something fresh and done very well”, said the chair of the 10-strong judging panel, Irish Times picture editor Frank Miller.

“A significant number of entries were very good and that gave us a lot of thinking to do,” Mr Miller said. There was “blood on the floor”, along with some great images after the adjudication process.

The competition was sponsored by Canon and judging was facilitated by Irish photo website Picturk.

Of the work of Photographer of the Year Amaia Arenzana he said: “She wasn’t trying to copy anything. It’s very much her own style.”

One of the winning images from the mother of five, who is from the Basque country and married to an Irish man, was of her son. “I have triplets, two are identical and he is the different one,” she said.

Taken on a family walk on Mornington beach last year, the image, titled Ad Infinitum, depicts the then nine-year-old Aitzol, having clambered to the end of a wall, peering at the high tide.

“It’s just his character, he’s very daring. That is why I took the photograph.”

The prize for Best Photograph went to Dubliner Aideen McFadden for her image Shadow Man, a haunting picture of her friend Tosh at a music festival.

“There was a massive storm and I got woken up because my tent got flooded,” says the former graphic design student at Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology. “I was wide awake at 5am and it was just beautiful and foggy everywhere.”

Mr Miller described her picture as “just intriguing. We didn’t know what it was – it was almost like a war zone.”

Both winners receive €2,000. Photographers of the top 100 images receive a specially compiled book of the images.