Fujifilm Distinctions winners announced

2009 entries accepted from 1 April

10 March 2009 15:28 GMT / By Verity Burns

Fujifilm has announced the winners of its 2008 Distinctions Awards.

The overall winner from 3000 entries was David Brunetti from Italy for his image entitled "Mother" - part of a series of portraits taken in the Rroma community in Romania.

Explaining how he captured the shot, David said: "I was taking pictures of other residents of this tiny Rroma village, so small it didn’t even have a name. After a while a woman approached me and without saying a word she took my hand, just as a mother would do with her own child, and she walked to her small house, she sat down on the bed, and folded her hands as if she was praying. That was it. I set the camera as quickly as I could, everything looked so perfect, the light, the environment, everything looked so picturesque, like a Flemish painting".

He added: "I was so concerned about losing that moment that I didn’t even bother with the light reading, I set the speed at 1 second and the aperture at F5.6 and that was it. Very often I double shoot everything, just to make sure, but not this time, there was no time, it was only a single shot. And as the shutter was counting the time, the scene I was looking at just felt so right".

David wins £1000 for his entry which he plans to use for his next photographic trip to Georgia, while runner-up Michael Bodiam receives £500, and third-place Sarah Turton picks up £250.

The Distinctions Awards are almost unique now in that entries must have been shot on film, similar to Fujifilm’s Student Awards.

Entries for the 2009 awards can be submitted from 1 April this year, so if you're a non-digital photographer, head over to the Fujifilm Ditinctions website for more information and to check out all the winning and shortlisted images for 2008.

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