I just found out that this photo below of Austin on the Fourth of July was selected as the winner for the Annual Smithsonian Magazine Awards in the Americana category. Sweet! I’m happy that an HDR picture has won such a prestigious award. These contests traditionally eschew things that are too far away from the classic film techniques. But hey, it’s 2007… all the cool people use DIGG, read TechCrunch, watch Lost, and shoot in HDR, right?

I actually had two pictures selected for the 50 finalists, which is also a first. The other picture (I put below the fireworks shot) of the monkey in Kuala Lumpur is not HDR… it’s just a straight up shot of a monkey sitting in front of the inky blackness of the main chamber of the Batu Caves. It was a finalist in the “Natural World” category, where I lost bigtime to this shot of ants and some kind of amber-lookin-stuff. It’s a good shot for sure. It seems a strange coincidence strange that both photos were from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.