When this year’s Banff Mountain Photography Competition winners were just about to be announced and festivals coordinator for Mountain Culture & Environment, Christine Thél, was busy sending out congratulations to the seven award winners (from four different countries) and nine photographers (from five different countries) who received special mentions. But that’s easy work compared to the avalanche of images received that had to be uploaded to The Banff Centre’s  FTP site, saved to an external hard drive, entered into a database, and then finally perused by a select jury.

Christine has been working with the Banff Mountain Photography Competition for the past four years and 2009 marked a special development for the program. Previously, photographers have submitted hard copies of images for the jury, but in the past several years Christine noticed a decline in entries and concluded “we needed to go digital”.

Was she ever right! In 2009, the number of images doubled from the previous year to over 4,200, with more than 600 photographers competing from 41 countries. Of the total submissions, 95 per cent were submitted digitally. With assistance from The Centre’s Information Technology Department,  Christine set up a special page on The Banff Centre’s FTP site to receive the images and she then downloaded them to an external hard drive for viewing later with the jury.

Not only is the online system more effective in generating and storing more image submissions, Christine also believes the images were of better quality. “Several of the semi-professional and professional artists that hadn’t submitted recently returned to us because of the digital uploading system,” says Christine. And as if that’s not enough, there’s an important “green” component to the whole competition now. There was less waste because very few images had to be printed and we reduced emissions since no postage or return postage of the entries was needed.

This year’s jury consisted of three Canadian members, Alec Pytlowany and Andrew Querner (both photographers and past award winners), and Kristy Davison, the photo editor for Highline Magazine. The jury selected Nathalie Daoust’s artistic and ephemeral image of a young woman in a misty mountain landscape as the grand prize winner; a bit of a departure from the traditional mountain sports or landscape image that we’ve seen in the past. But festivals director Shannon O’Donoghue is happy with their selection as it aligns perfectly with the inspiring creativity mandate of The Banff Centre.

All the winning images are now displayed online and will be in the Sally Borden Building by late October. The images will be featured as part of the Film Festival intermission video, and will also travel to various locations throughout Canada and the United States to be enjoyed by those who aren’t able to make it to Banff.

Credit: The winning photo for the 2009 Banff Mountain Photography Competition. A stunning image by photographer Nathalie Daoust.