Who won our January 'Abstract' photo comp?

Huge congratulations to Reed Plummer who has won our January ‘Abstract’ photo competition from more than 1,000 entries, with his image 'Surge', as judged by guest judge Jeremy Daalder of Melbourne fine art studio and photo lab Image Science:

With this image, Reed has taken a very common subject (waves) and from them creates a wonderful abstract – one that works at several levels, and indeed at several viewing sizes.

Like many good abstracts, it’s not immediately obvious quite what it is of, and how and from where it was captured. Compositionally it uses symmetry to strong effect, and the image has the reduced palette of many of the best colour images, with a lovely juxtaposition of the warmer and cooler tones.

There’s also a fantastic sense of grounding to the image, with those cold, dark tones suggestive of the great deep – almost like the viewer could fall off a cliff – down, down, into the unknown abyss! Poor swimmers might call it ‘Thalassophobia’, but in all, Surge is just a great abstract image & very worthy winner.

Well done Reed – and if you’d like to make a nice print of this we’d be happy to provide one of those as an added prize - just drop us a line and we can get that going for you! Would come up a cracker on metallic paper we’d bet!

Thanks to the our amazing sponsors at BenQ, Reed has won a BenQ SW240 monitor with an RRP of $699.

On Facebook, Reed polled strongly in the People's Choice too, and with more than 240 likes at last count, was a clear winner. That means he's also bagged the People's Choice title and a 12-month subscription to the photo mag of his choice – Australian Photography or Capture.

You can see the full list of shortlisted images over on our Facebook page, and if you fancy entering our February comp, there's just 10 days left - the theme is 'landscape' and you can enter here.