2024 arrived—the year of “dreaming big, then testing the limits of my sanity.”
So, in the spirit of reckless ambition, I uploaded around 20 photos to the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition in Hungary. My modest hope was that if a few of them made it past the first round of pre-selection (not with the lowest score, but at least somewhere in the middle of the pack), I’d already be happy.
And lo and behold: almost all of them advanced!
Even better, two of my photos received outstanding scores—one of them ranking as the third-highest in its category! I nearly fell off my chair… if I had been sitting. But I wasn’t. Because I was painting. A room, not a picture.
With the first round completed, I waited for the next one with cautious optimism and very low expectations. Naturally, fate had its own sense of humor and made sure that the second round of judging landed exactly on the second day of our vacation—our travel day, to be precise.
So, there I was, gripping the steering wheel somewhere in the middle of Germany, while my wife was following the results on her phone, and I was trying to breathe normally.
And then the news came.
A massive debate had erupted around my photo.
One of the judges was hell-bent on throwing my image out of the competition, going 6-to-1 against it. He didn’t explicitly say, “This is a piece of crap,” but let’s just say he used every other possible way to imply it. In his view, the photo deserved to be immediately removed, preferably burned, and its ashes scattered into the ocean.
At this point, I felt my stress levels spike to hazardous levels, and I made a decision: I would not deal with this until we arrived at the hotel, and I had a cold beer in my hand.
So, that’s exactly what I did.
By the time I had secured my life-saving beer, the debate was still raging on. The same judge had already persuaded two or three more people that my photo was nothing short of a visual crime and was just one step away from issuing an international arrest warrant against it.
And then, like a hero entering the saloon in a classic western movie, my savior arrived.
Tamás Vitray Jr.
He surveyed the battlefield, adjusted his stance, and dropped the bombshell question:
“Are we seriously considering throwing THIS picture out??”
A dramatic silence followed, which was then broken by Péter Fáth, who simply stated:
“We can’t do this to the public. These images deserve to be seen.”
At that moment, my blood pressure returned to human levels, my breathing became functional again, and I came to terms with the fact that one of my photos had made it into the exhibition.
But the story wasn’t over yet.
Weeks and months passed, and I slowly started recovering from the emotional rollercoaster of the jury process, when suddenly—like a bolt of lightning from a clear sky—another email arrived.
I had won an award.
But not just any award.
My photo had been chosen for the cover of the competition’s official book.
That was the moment when fate flipped a giant, grinning middle finger to the judge who had been so eager to banish my image into the depths of a digital dumpster.
Suddenly, all the struggles, all the frustrating moments, all the jury drama faded into insignificance.
Because if there was ever a moment to say “It was all worth it”—this was it. 😎
