A few weeks ago I entered a local photography competition called ‘Photos for Fairbridge’. The winners and runners up would be sold to raise money for the Fairbridge charity. There were various categories, nautre, urban, people, maritime, etc. On a whim I entered a few photographs. One in maritme and two in nature. We were invited to an evening at St Georges Hall where the winners would be announced.

I can’t say I’ve ever been to a real red carpet event. That was a nice thing to see.

A great turnout too.

The first thing we found was that my girlfriend Sam was a runner up in the ‘People’ category. That was really great to see. Seriously proud of her for that. The winner was fellow Fab Collective member Jane MacNeil with a photo from the Liverpool Santa Dash. Both great shots.

After looking around it turned out that I won the ‘Nature’ category with the following photo. I was pretty chuffed with that.

After riding the high of winning ‘Nature’ it turns out that I’d also won a 2nd category, ‘Maritime’.

This was turning out to be a fantastic night. 2 winning photos and a runner up for us. Great stuff.

The winning prints in each category were to be auctioned off during the night with the running totals being updated as the night went on. They put the current bids on the screen and I thought “Wow! £200 for my maritime photo.” But you see I got that wrong. It was £2,000! I couldn’t believe it. I sell similar sized prints for a lot less than that and there was someone here bidding £2,000 for one. Amazing! The nature photo was also doing well at £250.

I was really really happy with that but most importantly I was incredibly proud to have helped the Fairbridge out in this way. I just don’t have the money to donate £2,500 to a charity so its great that I could with my photography. In total they’ve so far raised £9,500 and hope to break £10,000 with more print sales. Fantastic news.

Lastly I just want to congratulate Matt Thomas for winning in the music category, and to Mark McNulty for judging and the work he put into making it a success.