Wrecked Fire Truck, originally uploaded by DaveWilsonPhotography.

Each week, several hundred photobloggers enter a competition on the “Photo Friday” site. A theme is announced and anyone who is interested can submit the URL of one photo on that theme. The following week, voting is opened up to the entrants and the week after the winners are announced.

I’ve entered half a dozen times or so when the theme seemed to fit an image I have somewhere on the photoblog but the competition always has some truly superb images and several hundred entries so I never expected to appear in the winning list. This morning, though, I was surprised to see a spike in blog traffic from PhotoFriday and even more surprised to see that this picture won the last challenge on the theme “Damaged”.

Given the other pictures in the challenge and some of the folks who entered (my picture beat one by David Nightingale, a truly outstanding photographer!) this leaves me feeling very honoured indeed.

Sorry to spend yet another blog post blowing my own trumpet but this one really caught me off guard and has definitely made my photographic week.

Just for the record, I would have scored at least 3 of the other top 5 pictures, including David’s, higher than mine.

Shuttle Orbiter, Space Center Houston, originally uploaded by DaveWilsonPhotography.

Back in September, I was fortunate enough to spend a weekend at Space Center Houston with our Cub Scout pack. I’m sure many of the other parents and the JSC staff thought it was odd but I carried a tripod around all weekend and managed to get quite a few good shots of the exhibits while there were practically no other people around (we spent the night in the visitors’ center and the boys were off doing activities most of the time when they were not sleeping – great HDR time for Daddies with tripods).

There is no full sized orbiter in the visitor center but “Adventure” offers a look at the nose section and flight deck. This image was one that cried out for black-and-white. The texture of the tiles wasn’t too obvious in the original image but a bit of tweaking brought it out beautifully.

If you happen to be down in Houston with a day to spare, I can definitely recommend Space Center as a great place to take a family even if you’re not camping with the Cub Scouts.