Taking the City Winner title last year from the CAMANAVA leg of the yearly photo walk held by Scott Kelby around the globe, I never really expected to win again this year. As the saying goes, lightning only strikes once. So I instead chose a city where I think I would get more interesting photographs.

The Philippine National Railway leg was full, the Antipolo City leg which really piqued my interest was too far away, and so was the Tanay leg, the Binondo, Manila group was also filled to the rafters and I already did my share of walks there anyways.

So that left me with the Pasig City photowalk, which was almost filled up. I signed up with four slots still open and as I finished filling up all the required fields and clicked the submit button, I was number 50 on the list, which was the last slot. Talk about last minute.

I got a total of 184 photos from 8 ‘til 11 in the morning shoot. Pretty average output considering the number of places we passed by. I narrowed them down to three photos, an image of a woman at her banana store, a girl surrounded by the roses she was selling and a group of policemen doing their daily regiment. Unfortunately, by my estimation, the three was not really up to par to win this leg of the walk.

It was a total surprise then when a fellow photographer from the said walk texted me that it was my entry that got picked as the City Winner. My photo was gonna be 1 of the 48 from the Philippines (yup we had 48 legs, our country held one of the most number of photo walks around the world) that would compete against the whole world which has a total of 1,112 photo walks.

The photo was taken at the front yard of the Pasig City Hall. A group of police officers were doing their daily exercises then; lined up for another round of activity. Their gritty metal shields on hand; one of them looked at me from his shield and I pressed the shutter. The morning light was hitting the trees right behind them just right and the shade white balance on my camera really made it more interesting.

If they judged it to be the best from the Pasig City leg, then I guess that it really was the best among the bunch. You won’t hear no complaints from me on that.

 

Scott Kelby’s 3rd Annual Worldwide Photowalk
Scott Kelby Worldwide Photowalk - Pasig Leg