Tonight was another competition night at the Berkeley Camera Club.  This competition allowed us to enter one image in Travel category and two in Journalism.  I was rather surprised a couple months ago to find that I had been promoted to the Masters category for Travel (the highest of 4 levels of competition), though I am still at the Intermediate level for Journalism (the second of 4 levels) — I have never done all that well in the Journalism category.

It seems the club has promoted too many people to the Masters level of Travel, since there were as many images there as combined in all three other levels.  The competition was tough, as always at the Masters level, but I am proud (and a bit surprised) to say that I was awarded First Place tonight for a photo I took in South Vietnam in October of two women in a local fish market:

As I said, Journalism has never been my strong suit, but both of my images placed tonight in that category too (in Intermediate — second of 4 levels).  Both of these were shot in Cambodia on the same trip as the above Vietnam photo.

Second place was a bike stuck in the mud with a load of piglets.  The commentator noted that the bike rider seemed to be smiling, and she thought he should have been cursing.  That really was the case throughout Cambodia though.  These people were dirt poor, and were suffering the worse flooding in 60 years, yet we constantly saw people smiling and couples laughing as they wound through the flooded streets and muddy roads.  It helped put in perspective the grousing in America by people with more wealth than these people will ever see in their lifetimes…

I also received 4th place for another photo shot the very next day at a local lake village.  The commentator loved the composition and colors, but said she would have thought it was just a lake village and not realized it was a flood other than the title.  She obviously didn’t notice the rooftops behind the boat, which are at the lake water level.  Normally those are normal 10 foot roofs above their floors, which are in turn normally several feet above the lake on stilts.  The lake was 15 feet above the normal high water mark. The home floors were designed to be raised, but were now so high that the occupants had to crawl under the roof to have any cover from the weather at all.  We had planned for a lunch in a floating restaurant, but the kitchen was fully flooded and we had to go elsewhere:

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Life is too darned short to sit around being bored. (Dorothy Galyean)