The world is full of surprises. Take photo contests, for example. You enter your images, send them off with a casual shrug, and… nothing happens. Business as usual.
Then, out of nowhere—long after you’ve written it off as just another failed attempt—an email strikes like lightning from a clear sky:
“Congratulations! Your photo has placed in the Lowland Photo Contest!”
At this point, the human brain enters emergency mode. Because in today’s world, this can mean one of two things:
- I actually won something.
- Or a Nigerian prince wants to leave me his fortune… if I just send him a small processing fee first.
But this time, it was real. The Lowland jury had officially declared that my image wasn’t just another drop in the ocean of over 5,000 entries—it was one of the awarded ones! “Highly Commended.”
I was over the moon! Birds could have been caught with my bare hands. Snails too, though that would have been trickier… slimy, slippery little things.
The photo that won me this honor was called “Hyperjump.” A fitting name, considering the painstaking effort it took to convince a snail to move in the right direction for the perfect shot. I spent countless nights experimenting, testing, and searching for the right subject, only to realize that whenever I finally found the right angle, the snail would immediately start crawling in the wrong direction.
But at last, the image was captured. And if someone had told me at the start of my journey that my first big international success would come from a small, stubborn gastropod, well… I’d probably have bought them a beer for their sense of humor.
Then came the big moment—the contest book was published. I eagerly flipped through the pages to find my image, and that’s when I got hit with the next surprise: they had titled my photo “Turbo Snail.”
Turbo Snail.
The very same creature whose speed could be outpaced by a sleepy retirement home on a Sunday morning had now been reborn as an icon of velocity. But you know what? At that moment, I couldn’t have cared less.
Because the important thing was this: that stubborn snail and I had somehow bent time and space, and the Lowland jury had decided—this image deserved recognition.
Sure, the colors in the book weren’t exactly what I had submitted, but at that point, nothing else mattered. As I held that book in my hands, I felt just as proud as if I had won the overall category… or the Olympics.
And if one day a snail ever enters a Formula 1 race? You can bet I’ll be there in the front row, camera in hand. 😄
