Camera make and the Sinulog photo contest

Albert Pedrosa
Photo mania

I WOULD like to congratulate the winners of Sinulog Photo Contest 2016. Secondly, I would like to personally congratulate my student Ryann Ablen for bagging first place under the Contingent Category. I guess it’s try again for next year for those who didn’t make it. Maybe the Gods of luck will be on our side next time.

I will have to say that the results of the judging this year has improved. Not there yet but getting better. Kudos to the staff behind the photo contest and let’s make it better next year. Among the many congratulatory posts on Facebook, I stumbled upon a post by photographer friend Carlito Felicen, more popularly know as Kangkang. He is a consistent placer and he made it again this year.

In his facebook post he said, “I think shooting Sinulog Photo Contest has changed, just compete with yourself to be better and be different.” I understand that the winning attitude is to go for gold and there is no amount of excuse to justify your loss. However, I think that a statement coming from a photographer who has been in this industry decades ago and probably has seen it all, must be worth pondering on.

I think that competition can easily confuse you out of your goals. Sometimes we don’t realize that through competition, we become better than who we are the last time, and we often fail to acknowledge that we have already come so far. Put yourself on the test every time and the only person that will set the limits is yourself.

More than the happy faces of the winners last week during the awards night is the launching of Fujifilm X-Pro2. It’s the flagship camera of Fujifilm and seems to be really doing well with pros. I had a quick chat with Fujifilm endorser Jan Gonzales and surprisingly he said the flash sync for the camera is listed at 1/250 and can even work at slightly higher shutter speed. What else did you expect for two strobe heads to talk about other than lights.

I’m normally tasked to prepare the files of Sinulog winners before printing, making sure that the colors and and conversion and editing of raw files would come out right. While working on the files I was curious at how many winners used mirrorless cameras with all the hype of photographers shifting to mirrorless. It was interesting to find out that a few mirrorless brands made it through, while DSLR still dominated the figures.

What’s surprising is the figure of Canon and Nikon both getting forty three percent. That’s evenly divided among the two giant brands. There were two unknown camera makes in the list and given the lens used, I can’t conclude, but it looks like a Nikon. One camera model that made it is a Canon Powershot. It’s still the shooter in the end.

Keep on shooting, everyone!

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