Travel Photographer of the Year, Royal Geographical Society.

It was a baking hot day in London last Thursday and in the garden of the RGS to see the TPOTY exhibition the sun was beating down; I felt as though I was on the way to one of the destinations in the sign below!!!

The Travel Photographer of the Year award was founded by professional photographer Chris Coe and his wife and business partner, Karen, in 2003.

They wanted to show that travel photography was much, much more than holiday snaps and pretty postcards. Travel photography encompasses a range of genres and subjects, from landscape to food, from architecture to people and from reportage to wildlife. Travel photographers must be able to take many differing types of images and work in vastly diverse light.

The exhibition is set up in the same way that I have seen both the IGPOTY exhibitions and the travelling WPOTY at the Edinburgh Botanical Gardens. It is largely outdoors.  Large prints are mounted on foam board and then weatherproofed.  There is interesting information about each category and also the winners and runners up.  Useful technical information is provided and the prints are mounted on curved display stands.  Categories vary from year to year but this year  include: Monochrome , Wild Stories, Vanishing and Emerging Cultures, Metropolis, Extraordinary and First Shot, a category for beginners.

The overall winner this year was Timothy Allen from the UK with his monochrome images of the Dogon people of Mali.    The Young Photographer of the Year Award went to Jonathon Rystrom from Denmark.

Interestingly all of my favourite images were black and white.  I did very much like all of winner Timothy Allen's images, especially one of a Dogon woman sheltering from the rain.  I liked the rich soft tones.  He used 1/25o second exposure which was fast enough to stop the raindrops whilst still providing a little movement blur.  There is excellent use of DOF to blur the background and I liked the composition with the subject placed to the right of the image looking into the picture.  I particularly liked his shot of the curious villager looking out of his window to keep an eye on these interesting intruders.  There is a wonderful expression on the man's face.

The image of the Kogafoss Waterfall in Iceland by Emmanuel Coupe from France is another favourite.  It is a simple, cut-back image featuring the whole waterfall and using a long exposure to blur the movement of the water.

In the Wild Stories section I enjoyed the monochrome Camargue Horses by Gail von Bergen-Ryan, Switzerland.  The power and energy of the horses is amazing.  It has a wonderful sky and a fast shutter speed leaves every drop of spray crisp and sharp.

My particular favourite, though, was by Italian photographer Marco Urso.  It is of a brown bear taken at Kurile Lake, Kamchatka, Russia.  The bear is hunting sockeye salmon and it fills the frame.  A fast shutter speed of 1/2000 has been used to stop every movement - a fantastic instant in time.

Images can be seen on the TPOTY website.