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This week I entered my first Digital Image competition, meaning rather than physical prints being judged, they judge your images by looking at them on a big (30″ in this case) monitor.
I entered three images that I took within the last year as according to the rules of the competition, and to my surprise I did amazingly well with all of my entries.

In the Photojournalism, Event and Editorial category, I placed both 1st and 2nd.
And in the Architectural, Design and Still Life category I placed 1st.
On top of that, my winning image in the Photojournalism, Event and Editorial category received the Best in Show award for the competition along with an award of merit!

Here are my entries (click for larger views), after which I will give some detail on what I was doing when I took them and what results I was trying to obtain as I adjusted my camera.

First on the left is my image titled “Ted 14.52″. The name was chosen as a poke towards Ted Dayton, who has been known in the past to enter prints in competitions with random numbers placed after his image names for no apparent reason.
This image won the Best in Show award, along with 1st place in the Photojournalism, Event and Editorial category, plus it received a ribbon of Merit for scoring higher than 80 points (only 4 in the entire competition received one). The photo  itself was taken at about 6am on the dunes in Death Valley.  Unfortunately it had rained the entire week prior to our visit, so photos of the dunes themselves were far from spectacular, and those that were good were quite hard to find. As we were walking up the backside of one of the larger dunes in the area, I looked up and saw the scene in the photograph. I knew a silhouette would best suit me here, so I quickly adjusted my camera to be about 1.5-2 stops underexposed, adjusted my aperture to f16 to make sure I kept the dunes in the foreground sharp and snapped a few shots at different exposures.  Once home I brought the photo into Photoshop, and using the dodge and burn tools, I darkened and lightened some of the areas that give the image balance (the lines on the dune in the lower right for instance).
Taken with my 24-105mm F4L lens at at 28mm, f16 on a tripod using a cable release.

The second image titled “The Chase” scored 2nd place in the Photojournalism, Event and Editorial category.  This was taken at Auto Club Speedway in March for the Suzuki AMA Superbike race.  Not having a press pass should not keep you from finding a good picture. In this case, I found a good hole in the fence looking straight down a chicane. I had taken quite a few photos here, but none had the feeling of this one. My goal on this set was to get the rider in front in sharp focus while creating just enough depth of field to give you a sense of distance between the riders. So I set my aperture at f9 using my 28-300m at 300mm F3.5-5.6L lens. Shutter speed was 1/640 sec.

The third image titled “Scotty’s Castle” was taken at Scotty’s Castle in Death Valley (nice original name, huh?!). This was on the same trip that I took the first image, just a couple of days later.
This photo received 1st place in the Architectural, Design and Still Life category.
Having gone to the castle in the middle of the day, the sunlight was quite harsh so it was hard to get anything from the outside without having harsh shadows. However I walked into this tower just to see what was in there, and this is what I saw when I looked up. I intentionally lined up the railing in the lower left corner in order to lead your eye into the image. This was taken hand held at 1/250 sec at f2.8 using my 16-35mm f2.8L lens.  Using Photoshop and Lightroom, I darkened and lightened some areas to give it better balance.