Update: 20/10/2013 - the 2013 Competition winners have now been announced and can be see on the Take a View website (link at bottom of the post). The winning image by Tony Bennett is a real stunner from Crummock Water and a worthy winner!

After my near success in last years Take a View landscape photographer of the year competition with 5 short-listed entries, I have decided again (against my better judgement) to put some entries in this year’s competition in the Classic View and Your View categories. The winning images from the 2012 competition can be seen here > Take a View 2012 Winners.

*My shortlisted entries in the 2012 lpoty competition.*

Last year there were many controversies over the winner who had the winning image and 2 other commended images disqualified for breaking the entry rules. The new winner announced following at least a week of internet speculation and blog posts from various photographers (most notably the blogs of Alex Nail and in great depth from Tim Parkin) as to why the original winning images should be disqualified was Simon Butterworth (a long time favourite of mine) with a very different shot of the tenement buildings in Port Glasgow. Simon’s image showed that the landscape photographer of the year competition is not as predictable as many people believe and is worth entering, the speculation and outrage regarding the original winner rather tainted the announcement of the new winner. The judges, following an investigation handled the situation very well and took the action necessary to protect the integrity of the competition and although all of the press releases had been sent, the winners announced in the Sunday Times and book gone to print they upheld the competition rules and promoted Simon’s images to the overall winner’s position.

The task of choosing images for this competition is always difficult, looking through past winners and inclusions in the Landscape Photographer of the Year book always leaves me a little puzzled as to the kind of image that may do well in the competition. I therefore have to go with images that I feel work photographically but will also appeal to a wider audience, there is a consensus that you need to ramp up the saturation and create over the top HDR images in order to progress in the competition, I would partially agree with this but I do not think that this is really necessary. After last years winner and some of the pictures in the 2012 Take-a-view book I think many photographers will re-think their entries this year. There is an interesting group on Flickr of Landscape photographer of the year rejects, a group of amazing photographs including a couple of mine turned down from lpoty, well worth a look here > Lpoty Rejects on Flickr,

I have slimmed down my chosen images for the 2013 Landscape photographer of the year competition to around 10 which I have displayed below, I would love to get an image in the book this year after the 5 photographs getting so close last year!