Jim O’Neill recently took first place in the Grade C ‘Symmetry’ competition. A great achievement in its own right but, it actually scored better than any other image, across all grades, on the night – a tribute to how the image was captured and its faithfulness to the theme. This is Jim’s account of how he made the image:

“The idea of symmetry immediately conjured images of school days to me with a folded sheet of paper and paints so that was my starting point. I failed miserably to set up something of my own so I started to look outside. I looked at leaves and in particular ferns but to my surprise they were not quite symmetrical, as I had thought”.

“As pylons were in the news a lot I gave them a look and was happy to go with this. I sourced one that was easily accessible, close to the road and in a quiet spot. Initially I wanted to shoot it straight on but as I was snapping away I thought, what would it look like directly underneath. The look for me was perfect and I took several shots, hand held and got out of there quickly!!”

“Camera used was a Nikon D80, Tokina 11mm-16mm wide angle lens. Manual mode, ISO 200, f8, 1/320 shutter speed and white balance on cloudy”.

“Post processing: cropped to line up the corners, sharpened slightly and a small bit of colour enhancement to bring out the blue in the sky a bit more”.

Well done Jim on a worthy winning shot.

See full details of the competition here.
How I took that Shot – Karen Fleming – winner Grade A
How I took that Shot – Finbarr O’Shea – winner Grade B