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WINNERS!
2006 Travel Photo Contest

First place winners in the three categories of the annual travel photo contest are Steve Pruett of Buford, Mary Maxwell of Atlanta and Judy Foster of Cumming. Each is awarded a round trip ticket for two to any destination AirTran Airways flies in the continental United States.

Second- and third-place winners in each category are Sarah Smith Rohrer and Jerry Gale in People, Marc Vogel and Kathleen Piechota in Places, and Ron Schroll and Lisa Messina in Animals.

Click on the winning photos to see a gallery of the top ten photos in each category.

• About the judges • About the contest • The prizes

First place in each category

PEOPLE	FIRST PLACE Steve Pruett Pilot Brandan Lail glances over his shoulder at a bright sunset, while flying at 5,000 feet.
• Click to enlarge, see top ten photos. What the judges said: Corinne Adams said: "I love the abstraction of the photo, love that you don't know he's a pilot. ... Those are great, warm, glowing colors." Susan Todd-Raque said: "It plays with your imagination. ... His face looking out and the reflection is almost like a ghost looking in. ... The more you look at it, the more you love it." Pruett, in maintenance at Peachtree Corners Baptist Church, shot the photo using a Nikon D70 digital camera.
PLACES	FIRST PLACE Mary Maxwell This photo, titled "Lady," was a shot of the side of a building in Siena, Italy, taken in April.
• Click to enlarge, see top ten photos. What the judges said: Adams said: "The photographer is perfectly placed to take a great photo -- I wish I'd taken it. ... She's naked, but she's the voyeur." Todd-Raque said: "In Italy, practically every corner has an altar to the Virgin Mary. This is an interesting turnabout on that thought. ... The photographer really had to look around and look up to see this photo." Maxwell, a nuclear medicine technologist with St. Joseph's Hospital, whose hobby is photography, shot the photo using an Olympus C-60 6-megapixel camera. Maxwell also had a finalist photo in the people category.
ANIMALS	FIRST PLACE Judy Foster Traveling through Vermont in July, Judy Foster photographed this scene.
• Click to enlarge, see top ten photos. What the judges said: Adams said: "I want to know what are the odds of that cow standing there? It's perfect composition of those three objects. ... I'm not sure it's a real cow." Todd-Raque said: "The photo's great sense of humor is what makes it fun. It's like public art." Adams and Todd-Raque couldn't resist some advice to make the photo even more appealing: Straighten the horizon and crop the photo to make it more of a panorama. Judy Foster shot the photo using a Canon PowerShot S1 IS digital camera, but she says Jim's the real photographer in the family. The Fosters, who retired in June, were on a six-month trip in their catamaran when they took the tour of Vermont. And, yes, she says that's a real cow, and his name is Clarence.

• See all the finalists

About 4,000 digital and print photos were submitted to our travel photo contest. Most of the photos were digital, illustrating the trend away from prints, though we did receive more than 1,000 snapshots.

Some of the photos were stunning, some were funny, some were sad. As in past years, lots of people spent their vacations at the beach or out West. Others ventured to South America, Africa, Asia and Europe.

About the judges

Both judges are from Atlanta Celebrates Photography.

Corinne Acams

A fine arts photographer, Corinne Adams is a partner in Wing and a Prayer Studio in Buckhead, and her work can be found in exhibitions and private collections around the country.

She serves as chair of the advisory board of Atlanta Celebrates Photography, an annual citywide festival of photographic arts; she co-founded the festival with Susan Todd-Raque.

Adams has a journalism degree from the University of North Carolina and has studied at the Atlanta College of Art. She is represented by Soho Myriad of Atlanta and Whitney Gallery in Savannah. Her work is in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia.

Susan Todd-Raque

An independent photo historian and collection consultant, Susan Todd-Raque is a co-founder of Atlanta Celebrates Photography. She has a bachelor's degree from DePaul University in Chicago and a master's degree from Emory University. Todd-Raque has taught at the Atlanta College of Art, Georgia State University, Creative Circus and Georgia Institute of Technology.

This fall, Todd-Raque curated an exhibition of Sylvia Plachy's work and "The Seasoned Eye: Robert Alter, Lucinda Bunnen and Chip Simone" exhibition. She is working on her book on photography in the South.

Our judges from Atlanta Celebrates Photography, Corinne Adams and Susan Todd-Raque, had a difficult time choosing the top photos in three categories: people, places and animals.

All three first-place winners will receive AirTran Airways tickets for themselves and a companion to any place the airline flies in the United States. Second-place winners will receive $100 and third-place winners $50.