Photographer Tzeng Chin-fa (曾進發) on Tuesday won one gold and eight bronze prizes at the Prix de la Photographie, Paris (Px3), one of Europe’s most prestigious photography competitions.
A set of pictures, titled Water Dance, won Tzeng gold prize in the Advertising/Fashion category.
The winning submissions depict people dancing underwater in a swimming pool.
Photo: Tzeng Chin-fa via CNA
“The photographer captures the charm of the dance through the special cut-out glass windows on the wall of the pool,” the Px3 Web site said.
Underwater photography has become popular in the past few years, the Miaoli County-based photographer said, adding that many newcomers are eager to take underwater wedding pictures.
However, taking good photos under water is a big challenge for models and photographers, he said, adding that good weather conditions are also required.
Tzeng said that for his Water Dance pictures, the models held their breaths while dancing underwater in an open-air pool, while he used high-speed continuous shooting to capture the images through a specially drilled hole in a window on the pool wall.
He avoided using artificial lighting to better capture the effects of natural light and shadows as well as the aesthetics and rhythm of dancing in the water, Tzeng said.
The pictures in the Water Dance series were shot over several sunny days, and it took about two years to complete the more than 10 shooting sessions, with each session lasting three hours, he said.
One of Tzeng’s bronze-winning photographs, named Rarely See Taiwan Snow Galaxy, was shot at about 4am on Hehuanshan (合歡山) in Nantou County during a snowy morning and depicts the Milky Way in the early morning sky.
A series of photos titled Creative Colorful Malao won him another bronze prize.
The pictures depict colorful Malao, a traditional dessert offering to Tian Gong (天公, the God of Heaven) during the Lunar New Year festival.
Tzeng said traditional Malao has three kinds of flavors: rice, peanut and sesame.
However, the modern food industry has pushed the creativity of sweets to the limit, and combined Chinese and Western ingredients to create 20 additional flavors, such as marshmallow, chocolate, pumpkin seeds, seaweed, almonds, purple rice and curry.
Tzeng won one gold and one silver prize for his series of photographs of early Taiwanese miners in last year’s Px3.
In July this year, he won nine awards, including two golds, in the People/Culture category for amateur photographers at the Moscow International Foto Awards.
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