CONTEST TIME
It’s been exactly five years since I last threw my hat in a photo contest.
It was the 9th Annual Images of the Grand Strand Contest - a local competition to crown the best photos showcasing this strange little stretch of beach towns coined The Grand Strand. It was a hybrid panel - partially judged by local experts and partially by popular online vote, the spoils being publication in the summer edition of Grand Strand Magazine.
If you do some simple math, five years ago will land you at February 2020 - about a month before Covid hit. I was a different person, and the world was a spectacularly different place.
I had been in Myrtle for just a couple months, but in that short time I had already amassed a handful of photos that I thought to be contest-worthy. I had hit the ground running at similar pace to life in CR - and this contest was a great way to show tangible evidence of that - to make a splash, so to speak - and maximize momentum in my new surroundings. A hit photo can do great things - it can establish connections, open doors, really make things happen [Editors note: I know because I finally just had one here recently, in the year 2025!]
So when I didn’t advance to even the second round of voting - it felt like the world was ending. Partially because it was. By the time the contest ended, a winner was chosen but life had frozen. A global pandemic. It took very little time for me to get over the loss and to start worrying about the essentials: food, water, and toilet paper, making sure I still had a job. There was no time to panic about underperformance in a silly contest - one that just a few weeks ago felt like life-or-death. Now it was time to panic about actual life-or-death.
Granted, under different circumstances, I would have let a defeat like that bother me, motivate me, drive me. To greatness or insanity, which ever came first. It was a defeat, after all. And I hate those. I left my home team in free agency and fumbled the ball in new colors.
But again, doing the math, the contest wrapped in late March 2020.
People had already turned the game off.
So here I am, five years later, ready to jump back in.
What happened in the meantime? Christ. I have no idea.
2021 and 2022 are such a blur to me that I honestly don’t even know if the contest was held. Beats the shit out of me (which is coincidentally what those two years did!)
2023 came and went, and by the time it was over, I was spending every last waking second working on my Iceland calendar. And truth be told about all three of those years: I took my best photos elsewhere.
This last 6-8 months have been different. I have gotten out there, up and down the Grand Strand, and the photo gods have shone down their light (literally - just look at that!)
So it was tough for me to pick just five - yes five is the maximum allowed entries - but I waited until the last minute to make my submissions… and they closed the pool at 11:57. So the ‘last minute’ was not the ‘last minute’ I thought it was, and my final submission was met with a strongly forebode ACCESS DENIED: PERMISSION NOT GRANTED. Well alright then. Four entries it is.
So this is my squad, and the snow shot above is my lead horse; the one I will ask people to get behind first [Editors note: see rules below]. I could have chosen any one of the 4-5 snow photos that ended up going mildly viral over the past few weeks, but ultimately decided on this one - partly to do with composition, partly because of the glow from the shops on either side and the reflections from the wheel on their shutters. I thought that gave it the best cozy, wintery touch; something we so rarely feel here.
Will I regret not choosing one of the the others, which have less storefront and more snow and lights, until I enter again in 2030 after another five year hiatus? God I hope not.
The swan photo choice was tough - this isn’t the best photo I took that day. There is a tighter shot of Mr. Swan striking a picture perfect pose. I mean PERFECT. Ultimately though I let that deter me - something that again, I may regret. The photo just doesn’t look real, even though of course, it is; I actually have video taken while shooting the photos and have shared that publicly.
But at first glance, in the era of AI and Photoshop (both make me sick) I don’t think I would have gotten the benefit of the doubt. This jadedness is likely a recent revelation - the authenticity of the viral snow photos was lightly contested across social media - which ultimately I have to respect.
I’d rather people question what they see than blindly like-and-share; that’s how AI slop, among many of the internet’s other ills, became rampant in the first place.
Alas, I chose the wide pic, which adds a local touch; you can clearly make out Myrtle Beach’s own Rainbow Row, located in Market Common, just behind the swan. That was largely hidden in the other photo.
SO.
Here’s how it works:
The 14th Annual Grand Strand Magazine Images of The Grand Strand Photo Contest.
You can vote once per day, per e-mail (wink wink).
The photos are sorted alphabetically by title. They do not include the name of the photographer.
MY PHOTOS ARE TITLED:
HAMMERTIME
SPRINGMAID RAYS
SNOW ON BROADWAY
MARKET COMMON SWAN
I would really, really appreciate your support.
I feel like I finally have some momentum going from the snow photos and this is now an ideal opportunity to keep that rolling.
Thank you as always for reading, and thank you again for you support and votes. God bless.