“Underwater Experiment: Alien Lily Pads,” Big Moose Lake

So many of the photographs that capture the Adirondack Park depict a zone that stretches from terra firma skyward. That’s one of the reasons we were drawn to Lynne Newhouse’s grand-prize-winning shot, a painterly, seemingly extraterrestrial perspective of what lies beneath. Newhouse, a high-school art teacher (she says she often tells her students, “I can’t look at life unless I look through a viewfinder”) from Hamburg, New York, took this photograph of lily pads by submerging her camera as she kayaked Big Moose Lake, where she’s vacationed for three decades. “It was an experiment that went right,” she says.

 

Of the hundreds of contest submissions this year we were impressed by entrants’ technique; the macro and color categories were particularly competitive. We were also delighted by the diversity of geography and subject matter, from an expertly composed gaggle of geese on Lake George to a moody Seventh Lake waterscape.

 

First- through third-place honorees will receive a commemorative piece of pottery made by Sue Young, of Jay. In addition to this trophy, the grand-prize winner will be granted free admission to the signature fall workshop sponsored by the Adirondack Photography Institute (www.adkpi.org), based in Inlet.