I am proud, excited, thrilled, and extremely happy to announce that I was named the 2025 Intermountain Photographer of the Year at the IPPA awards dinner earlier this month! Based on the print competition scores, I was the highest scoring general photographer in the competition this year!
“Lift-off” was my highest scoring image with an 87 (out of 100), based on PPA’s 12 elements of a merit image. This is my first image to earn the designation of ‘excellent’. I received good and helpful feedback on this image, and will work on it a bit to submit to PPA’s merit image review process.
In the Intermountain PPA print competition, I also swept the Animal Portrait category, with my images “Lift-Off”, “Symbiosis”, and “Warmth on Winter’s Shore”.
This image was titled ‘Symbiosis’ to bring together the ideas that life in northern Utah is highly dependent on the Great Salt Lake, and my belief that dogs are an integral part of life.
Warmth on Winter’s Shore was taken at Jordanelle Reservoir outside Park City in late December 2024. A couple was looking for photographs with their two senior dogs, and were looking for an ‘Alaska-like’ setting; they had spent time in Alaska when the dogs were young, but weren’t going to make it back to Alaska with the dogs again. It was a cold, slightly gloomy day, but the dogs really enjoyed getting out in the snow, and with hand warmers, all of the humans enjoyed the outing, too!
I also entered an image into the Male Portrait category. In PPA image categories, if a human plays a prominent role in the image, the image goes into a Male/Female/Group category.
This was initially judged to be below a merit (I think it scored a 79), but one of the judges scored it as an 84. To back up and explain the judging process, there are 5 judges on a PPA image competition panel, and when one or two judges score significantly higher or lower than the other judges, they discuss their scores. In this case, the judge who scored it high made the case that while there were technical issues (stray dog hairs, ways light could have been handled differently), the emotional impact of the image was strong enough to move the image into the merit category. The judge argued the case well enough that the image earned a merit and won the category.
As an aside, you may have noticed that these images all have framing around them. PPA, as part of their 12 elements of an image, strongly prefers images to have digital frames. I am not particularly good at making digital frames, and you’ll see in other posts that I don’t use them, but I wanted to present the actual images that were judged for the competition.
As I mentioned last year, I began a journey to become “a better” photographer, and while I am still very much on that journey (I’m not sure that it is actually a journey with a destination!) I feel like I am making progress toward that goal. Awards are amazing, and I am always honored to receive them – and I don’t want to diminish how happy I am to have received them – but the awards are only part of the story. As I make progress in my journey, I have met incredible people, photographed amazing dogs in stunning locations, and have become more and more inspired by my fellow photographers, who are such an incredible group of people. I’m also inspired by my 87 year old parents who still engage in life-long learning every day, and have set the best possible example for me.
To everyone who has been (and still is) a part of this journey, thank you all for your continued support and encouragement. It truly means more to me than I can express, and I am honored to have you all in my life.
Dogumentary Pet Photography
