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.

Thanks to the 181 people who voted for my picture in the Scott Kelby World Wide Photo Walk People’s Choice Awards. It came in 7th out of 900+ city winners who, in turn, were narrowed down from a pool of 35000+ or so entries. Although I didn’t win a prize, I’m extremely proud to have a picture in the top 10 of one of the competitions, especially since it was voted higher than any of the main competition winners and runners up.

You can see the main winners here and the People’s Choice winners here.

Voting is open until Tuesday for the Scott Kelby World Wide Photo Walk 2009 People’s Choice Award. My winning picture from the Austin walk is one of those in the running so, if you like HDRs of tire sculptures, your vote would be greatly appreciated. You can find the picture 4th down on the left on this page. To vote, click the rating you think the photo deserves, from 1 to 5 stars.