So my previous post was something of shameless gloat about a nice new camera I’d scooped for winning the first prize in the Macro heat of round 1 of the 2009 Photographer of the year competition, run by Practical Photography magazine. Well I’m afraid the bad news is that this post is equally as self centred and gloatful (I don’t think that’s a word) in nature!

Round 2 of the competition saw 80 photographers move through to a themed round that would whittle the entries down to just 6. The theme was ‘long exposure, over 4 seconds’. To be honest I was short on time and a little short on ideas, until I saw a photo of some marbles on Flickr. My previous straws shot that got me into round 2 had been taken at home, so I decided the follow the ‘home studio’ route again.

To that end I came up with Electric Blue and I’m very pleased to say the judges saw fit to give me a grand final place. There were no prizes for round 2, but with nearly £5000 of Jessop’s vouchers up for grabs in the final there was all to shoot for.

The picture itself is just an arrangement of marbles on some fleece and the blue lines are a blue led key ring that I rotated around the marbles whilst the shutter was open. The exposure was around 4 seconds as per the requirement for the theme.

You will of course not be surprised to hear that my next post is likely to be all about the final and what happened there. You can see a screen shot of the magazine page here. There’s also a blog post on Photoanswers.co.uk (Practical Photography Magazines web site) about round 2 with commentary here.