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| THIMOTHY POULTON, A Pier Too Far (c) Thimothy Poulton - Courtesy Carl Zeiss |
A Pier Too Far by Australian photographer THIMOTHY POULTON is the winning image in 2010 CARL ZEISS PHOTOGRAPHY COMPETITION “Light is my language”.
The second-prize winner is CARL DE SOUZA from Great Britain.
The third-place winner, CLARENCE LAM from Singapore.
Timothy Poulton took the winning picture “A Pier Too Far” at the Bellinger and Kalang rivers in Urunga in New South Wales, Australia. The image shows a timber footbridge that, thanks to a clever perspective, appears endless, disappearing into the horizon. The footbridge is framed by a yellow-violet sea of color in which the sunrise and river are immersed. The photograph symbolizes a moment of absolute serenity.
No effort was too great for Poulton in order to take his picture. He waited several hours with his ZEISS Makro-Planar T* 2/50 ZF.2 in order to capture the perfect light. “’A Pier Too Far’ stands for life’s journey with all its twists and turns and highs and lows. At the same time, the light emphasizes the beauty of the Australian coastline,” says Poulton, who lives in Sydney. “I would have never thought my picture had a chance among the many high-quality submissions. All the waiting was more than worth it.”
“The Carl Zeiss jury nominated the image to be among the top 10 because light has been used outstandingly as a design element. The picture has a very interesting atmosphere of light, with soft color gradients and strong contrasts. The conceptual composition of the image was excellent and the technical execution flawless,” said Martin Klottig, Marketing Manager of the Camera Lens Division at Carl Zeiss AG.
The members of the Flickr community selected A Pier Too Far as the winner from the top-10 shortlist. In order to make the contest more transparent, Carl Zeiss held it for the first time on Flickr, the global online photo community. Group members could not only follow all submissions, but also select the actual winners from the jury’s list. More than 800 votes were cast during the two-week evaluation period. The winning image received 369 votes, well ahead of the second- and third-place winners, who received respectively 107 and 106 votes. “We wanted to actively involve our community in the competition because the interaction with photographers is so important to us. That worked well, as the active and extremely creative participation shows,” says Klottig.
Under the theme “Light is my language”, Carl Zeiss encouraged photographers from around the world to illustrate and capture their ideas in exciting images between December 15, 2010 and January 16, 2011. Anyone could participate provided the image was taken with a ZEISS lens. That the expressive forms of light can be so diverse was evident in the numerous submissions with impressive light reflexes, messages in the out-of-focus area of the image (the bokeh), colorful accents created from long exposure times, and the soft glow of barely discernable light. “The three winning images exude both creativity and conscious composition,” says Klottig.
Winner Tim Poulton will receive a ZEISS Makro-Planar T* 2/100 ZF.2. The second-prize winner, Carl de Souza from Great Britain, will take home cinemizer Plus video glasses including a Nokia N8. The third-place winner, Clarence Lam from Singapore, will receive a Sony DSC-TX9 compact camera with ZEISS optics.
