To commemorate 50th anniversary of the signing of the Wilderness Act the Wilderness 50 Coalition established a photo contest. The winners and honorable mentions, more than 100 images in all, are now on display at the Smithsonian!

Wilderness Photo Exhibition at the Smithsonian

Here is the link to the Wilderness Forever site.

I was lucky enough to have an image chosen as an honorable mention! Here it is.

I have never had any images win any thing or get chosen for any exhibition, and I must say its quite an honor. The winning images are really stunning. My favorite is the Milky Way shot over Second Beach in Olympic National Park. But have a look for yourself!

And here is a link to the Smithsonian web site where you can vote for your favorites!

Here is an email I recently received from someone who visited DC in August and wrote to me about the exhibit:

“Hi Andy, just wanted to drop a line to say that while in DC over the weekend (Aug. 8 and 9, 2015) we enjoyed seeing your photo as part of the Wilderness Photo Exhibition at the Smithsonian. My wife works for the North Cascades Institute, and said that she had met you out on Ross Lake a little while back. Your photo looked terrific, and it was neat to see good representation from the NW in the show as a whole. Congratulations, and perhaps we will run into you sometime at another NCI event. The show is still up. The exhibit was one of my favorite things we saw in the museum. The prints were in a variety of sizes- a handful were about 3.5 feet on the long edge while the majority were around 18 or 20 inches, with a few in between. I thought the printing and mounting looked great for the most part (a couple of images were a little over-saturated for my taste, but I’m guessing that had more to do with the photographers’ aesthetics than the printing since most looked spot-on), and the exhibit was lit really nicely and the overall layout flowed well. I think that your photo was around 20 inches or maybe 2 feet on the long side, and the colors and sharpness looked great.”