I'm sorry for inflicting this image on my fellow PAD'rs. It's past my bedtime and I still have several hours of work to get ready for a class I'm teaching tomorrow so I'm breaking my prime directive and using an image not shot within the past 24 hours. Tomorrow night is the monthly club competition. The theme is JUNK - what were we thinking when we chose that one. (Yeah, I know. The club is made up of Freeman Patterson fans and FP often takes workgroups to junk yards for photo shoots. But....) This is one of my entries. Nature photography and JUNK are like water and oil - they don't mix. This was a difficult challenge for me - but I guess that's the idea. Tune in Friday to see how I did. Oh - and get this - the judge is a professional studio photographer who specializes in weddings. I'm going to love to hear his evaluations and critiques of JUNK.

Update - for the first time in my one year of competitions I was shut out of a ribbon. The judge was the strong silent type - no commments, no critique, just 1st, 2nd, 3rd - period. Further, he only looked at those items that he could recognize at a glance. Images like this one got 1 second (no joke) of his time and then he walked right by. Also, the winnners - with only one or two exceptions - were the biggest prints. One of his few comments as walking past an 8x10 was "I'd like to have seen this one printed larger". An abstract in the slide category was off the screen as fast as he could hit the advance. I belong to the club for only one reason - to learn. Learned very little that night except about the quirkiness of judging (which I already knew).