Kids playing in the fountain in downtown Olympia before summer comes to an end

I have never been a big summer person, I have always preferred both fall and winter, perhaps it has something to do with having red hair and blue eyes, I joke about getting sunburns from fluorescent lights. Maybe it is because I lived in Arizona for over 20 years and I am still a bit “shell shocked” from the extreme heat, but I have always looked forward to summers end.

With that said, this has been an interesting summer.  Ann and I took our first real vacation in over 8 years, so that is good.  I have been dealing with a number of dental issues, so that is bad.  All in all though it was a pretty good summer but I am looking forward to my favorite season when there gets to be a bit of a chill in the air in the evenings and the leaves start turning colors.

Good buy summer, hello fall.

Earlier this week I posed a gallery highlighting the 6 images that I entered into the 2016 Thurston County Fair.  Today I wanted to take a few minutes to show off the results and talk a little about the competition.  Based on the title of this post, just take a peek at the attached images to find out who the winner was :-)

This year marked a change in the rules for the fair.  Up until this year you were limited to a total of 6 images entered, this year you could enter up to a total of 8 but you will notice that I entered a total of 6.  I had 8 images selected and ready to go but as I was finalizing the submission I decided that I would have had to many images in one particular competition lot and decided to pull out what I thought were two of the weaker images leaving me with the 6 you see above.

On hindsight I might have pulled the wrong two as the ones that I decided to leave in the competition did a little worse than I anticipated while some of the ones that I was unsure of did quite well.  All in all this was my most successful year ever at the fair.

Back in 2014 I had one image that didn’t get a ribbon of any color, in 2015 I had a couple that only got honorable mentions but in 2016 I got 2 blue, 2 red and 2 white with no honorable mentions, everything placed either 1st, 2nd or 3rd.  The highlight for me though was that my Carnival Horse image got a best in lot, which was the best any of my images have done at the fair.

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If you look back through the archives of this blog you will find blog posts about my entries into the photography competition at the Thurston County Fair over the last two years.  This year marks my third year of participating in the competition and if you don’t want to take the time to scroll through a bunch of posts to see what I entered in 2014 and 2015, simply click on either of those years and it will take you to that post. :-)

Ok, enough about the past, what about this years fair?  The above gallery showcases the 6 images I entered into the Thurston County Fair for 2016.  They are spread across 4 different lots and in two different classes.  I will share a blog post soon in that I detail how each image did in competition but I will say now that this was my most successful year to date.  Another thing that I am quite pleased with is that two of the images entered this year were from the #WE35 project that I participated in last year.

Stay tuned and over the next few days I will share how each image did, as well as some thoughts about the fair and the photography competition.