Happy New Year! Good wishes from this month’s adjudicator: Glynn Paton.

Once again some great and interesting photographs Thank you to all who entered it’s a pleasure to judge across such a wide range of images, from London to the Falkland islands and places in between. Once again it has been a challenge to choose the best ones in such an interesting set of images,

Travel Image of the Month

Home time, Nagaland India by Jo Court

Often a good travel image tells a story and this is a brilliantly described one. The misty/rainy weather, hilly terrain. The shanty town atmosphere with a shop selling half a chicken, fish, pumpkins and cucumbers!  Then we come to the subjects of the image, the three children returning to school.   The author is in a great position to capture these and for them to be framed so well in the image.  As is so often the case in India, despite the obvious poverty the children are beautifully turned out, clean smart school clothes.  A worthy winner well done

Highly Commended

Lone Ranger, Inner Mongolia, China by Viren Bhatia

Sometimes there isn’t a lot to say about an intrinsically beautiful image.  This is just such an image.  The horse and rider are perfectly positioned and the sunset gives a beautiful colour palette of russet/orange, which is only broken by the complementary colour of the rider’s clothes. Beautiful.

Dead Vlei Dust, Namibia by Alan Cameron

I’m sure a lot of us have seen the black skeleton trees and the orange sand of the Namibian desert.  But this offering gives us a very different view,  The moody atmosphere is created by the dust cloud around the tree, also it gives us enough of a view of the terrain around and behind the trees.  Whilst there are some burned out areas, principally in the foreground and lefthand side of the image, these don’t detract from the overall impact of this inherently strong image

Inle lake fishermen, Myanmar by Rob Morgan

This is another image where we may have all seen many examples;  Inle Lake fishermen photos have been in competitions for quite a while.  But this one is different, it has atmosphere and balance.  I applaud the decision to turn the image to monochrome, though there are hints of colour in the foreground so this may just be a consequence of the type of light at that time of day.  Nonetheless, this gives us the “space” to explore the patterns made in the image.  There are many triangles, the fisherman, the oar, the reflections, the boat and the bamboo stick pointing toward the fisherman in the background.  Beautifully composed.