[Assam] First Prize Winner!

[Rajib Das]

C-da,

Have you put up all your photographs on Flickr?

Rajib


--- Dilip/Dil Deka <dilipdeka at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Guess who?  Chandan Mahanta had the best picture  in
> the Best Garden Photography category of the 2006 St.
> Louis Post-Dispatch Great Garden Contest.
>
======================================================================
>    
>   Picture perfect
>   By Becky Homan
>   SPECIAL TO THE POST-DISPATCH
>   08/12/2006
>             
> The pale-yellow flower of a native lotus (Nelumbo
> lutea) is a close-up photo by Chan Mahanta,
> first–place winner in the Best Garden Photography
> category of the 2006 St. Louis Post-Dispatch Great
> Garden Contest.
> (Chan Mahanta)
> 
> How do you tell a plant to say "cheese?"
> 
> Here's how, metaphorically speaking. You look for
> the most beautiful, if subdued, daylight - early in
> the morning on what will be a sunny day, or anytime
> that high clouds make for bright-but-overcast
> weather. You find a flower or foliage or some scene
> that moves you to want its picture. And you come in
> close if your camera has a macro lens, or you step
> back with a longer lens and work on just the right
> composition for your image.
> 
> Winners in the Best Garden Photography category of
> the 2006 St. Louis Post-Dispatch Great Garden
> Contest did most of these things. And more. All are
> amateur photographers, by the way, but with
> gardening or photography among their favorite
> hobbies.
> 
> "Overall, the entries were impressive," says contest
> founder, horticulturist and judge Ken Miller. "Some
> people took pretty common subjects and made them
> special. Others took exotics and did the same."     
>                  Advertisement
>    
> 
> 
> 
> Chan Mahanta of the Old Jamestown neighborhood near
> Florissant did both. He came in first in this
> category.
> 
> His close-up image of the pale-yellow flower of a
> native lotus (Nelumbo lutea) is breathtaking -
> familiar and alien, all at the same time.
> 
> That photo, says another of the contest judges,
> horticulturist John Mareing, "is quite unique in
> that he has focused his camera on the very center of
> the lotus flower at the time of pollination.
> 
> "Mahanta's photo captures the contrast between the
> impressive developing pod and the delicate stamens
> surrounding it," Mareing continues. "The composition
> is interesting and artistic, and the photo exhibits
> great clarity and depth."
> 
> Mahanta, like the third-place winner in this
> category, Dave Bennett, had won prizes in other
> categories of previous Great Garden Contests.
> Mahanta placed first in Best Home Garden by an
> Amateur in 2004, and Bennett won third place for
> Best Flower Garden in 2003.
> 
> This wasn't a problem for the judges, who worked
> "blind" when reviewing the photos and learned of
> each previous winner's status after making their
> picks.     MORE
>   SLIDESHOW: See photos of the winners gardens
>   GROUP WINNERS: Together again
>   EDIBLE WINNERS: Edible efforts win prizes in
> garden contest
>   SERENITY WINNERS: Outdoor oasis
>   PROFESSIONAL AID WINNERS: The 'wow' factor
>   AMATUER WINNERS: From cottage to collections
>   MORE CONTEST STORIES
>   2006 Great Garden Contest winners
>   Judges tell their own stories
> 
> 
> 
> "We don't have published rules regulating that," Ken
> Miller says. "We have an unofficial rule not to
> allow the same gardener to win two years in a row.
> These (2006 photo winners) already waited two years,
> and they've also gone into an entirely different
> field."
> 
> For Chan, photography grew out his father's love for
> the subject.
> 
> The elder Mahanta had dropped out of high school in
> the Assam state of British India in the eighth
> grade, Chan says. He went to learn commercial art
> and photography in Dacca, now the capital of
> Bangladesh. "He ended his career as a country
> photographer," Chan adds, when the prosperous tea
> trade waned near the end of British rule. But before
> that happened, Chan's father was a society
> photographer for both native and British society,
> "all of the 'Who's Who'," Chan says, "and he made a
> pretty decent living."
> 
> All of his photography was done without electricity,
> by the way, in a "lean-to" with a mirror reflecting
> sunlight through a small hole on the north side of
> the little building, for making exposures. "When I
> tell this to my friends in photography now," he
> adds, "they are mesmerized."
> 
> Chan's family was able to send him to the Indian
> Institute of Technology, where photography led him
> to study architecture. "Photography made a big
> impression on my life," Chan says. "It is the art of
> looking at things."
> 
> He didn't own a camera until 1971, a full year after
> immigrating to the states. It was then that he
> bought a single-lens reflex Canon. He still shoots
> with an updated version of that film camera but with
> newer Fuji Velvia film that, he says, produces
> beautiful color. "What I get with the digital camera
> can't quite match it, yet." All of his contest
> photos were shot on film.
> 
> Also a passion is the macro lens, designed to focus
> at very short distances for nearly life-size
> magnification. "If you go and frame something close
> up," he says, "all of a sudden a whole new world
> opens up, and you see things that most people miss."
> 
> The lotus photo is a prime example of that. But it
> isn't the first close-up lotus image that he's had
> published. He asks a visitor to wait a minute while
> he walks to another part of the airy house of his
> own design. (He practices architecture as Mahanta
> Associates, PC., Architects.) He returns with a copy
> of a Los Angeles Times magazine, dated 1976. On its
> cover is a Chan Mahanta lotus, photographed during
> his first years in this country. He was living in
> Pasadena at the time and met the magazine's editor.
> Exactly 30 years later, it is almost too much of a
> coincidence to see another of his lotus images on a
> cover.
> 
> "Lotus is my favorite plant," he explains, "all
> parts of it, the flowers, the leaves and the buds.
> 
> "But whenever I see something special," he adds, "I
> just go and shoot it."
> 
> Second-place winner Nancy Olson of Mehlville also
> has a fondness for close-up looks at her garden.
> "You don't have to be a wonderful gardener," she
> says, "to be attracted to the wonders in your yard."
> 
> Judges liked her beautifully lit blossoms of
> bleeding heart and her painterly image of a very
> common tomato plant. "Nancy turned tomatoes into
> art," says judge Miller. "Clearly, to her eye,
> vegetables rule."
> 
> "I kind of always have been attracted to
> photography," says the native St. Louisan, with a
> degree in English, two grown children, grandchildren
> and active church work that she shares with her
> husband, Jeff.
> 
> But in the fall of 1998, when Jeff's company
> transferred him to another city "temporarily"
> (two-and-a-half years), the two agreed that she
> would stay here. And with plenty of time on her
> hands, Olson says, she took a course in nature
> photography at the Missouri Botanical Garden.
> 
> It made a world of difference for her. "I totally
> fell in love with photography," she says.
> 
> Her family's old film camera eventually gave way to
> a new Nikon that uses film. Now, she also has a
> Nikon digital "that's just as fast as a film
> camera."
> 
> "If you're a serious photographer," Olson adds,
> "it's just so frustrating with the lag time in the
> shutter speed of some digitals." Half of her winning
> contest pictures were shot with film, half done
> digitally.
> 
> And like Chan Mahanta, she loves shooting "closer,
> and closer and closer. The farther in you go,
> there's another miracle and then another miracle -
> the exquisite nature of creation."
> 
> 
=== message truncated ===>
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