In recent years the number of photographic competitions has multiplied significantly and participating in all of them requires a lot of time. I have therefore decided to focus my attention on just a few of them, naturally those I consider relevant to my work and style.

First Prize in Fine Art, Polaroid International Awards

The very first competition I entered was the Polaroid International Awards back in 2000. The still life images I presented come from a project entitled ‘Quotidiano’ or ‘Daily Life’.
These images represent moments from daily life extracted from their normal environment and photographed in my studio using positive and negative Polaroid film.

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Black and White Spider Awards 2007, 3rd place in Fine Art

My next foray into the photographic competition world came about six years later. During that period my primary interest was in commercial photography and it was only late in 2005 that I began to reflect more deeply upon the idea of working on a single subject matter, the Sea. The picture for me that symbolised this choice was in fact from my very first meeting with the Portuguese coast. I remember well the emotions of that day. It was a Saturday morning in December, I had just arrived in Lisbon a few days previously. I borrowed a car from a friend and drove to the coast.

I could not possibly have imagined myself in front of such an incredible spectacle and even today when I photograph the sea, I still search for the emotions of that very first day.

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Black and White Spider Awards 2008, Honorable Mention in Still Life

In the meantime whilst I was still searching for my own personal vision of the sea, I continued for a period working on a series of black and whites pictures of flowers where the central theme was empty space as the backdrop for the image and this lead me to explore the same empty space principle also for my sea images. In both cases the composition centers around the color black.

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 Sony World Photography Awards 2009, Shortlisted in Landscape.

A beautiful surprise arrived in February 2009 with the Sony World Photography Awards and my first photographs of the sea reached the finals in the Landscape category.

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Black and White Spider Awards 2009, Nominations

In the succeeding months more or less the same images were recognised and selected during the Black and White Spider Awards.

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IPA Awards 2009, Honorable Mention

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EPOTY, 2nd place

Towards the end of 2009, while continuing to photograph the sea in black and white, I also began a project that for certain aspects brought me closer to and gave me greater contact with the force of the ocean. From childhood I had always been fascinated with the waves that crashed and broke onto the man made sea defences of my birth town, I had seen many photographs that grappled with this subject, many good works, but those that I was really looking for were not really in any way scholastic works but works that concentrate on capturing the sheer force and energy of nature, something more primal. From this was born ‘Intersections’.

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IPA Awards 2010, Honorable Mention

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Sony World Photography Awards

At the beginning of 2011 two commercial works were shortlisted at the Sony World Photography Awards.

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IPA Awards 2011, Honorable Mention

Further advancing the theme of ‘Mare’, some new images of a big storm a Nazaré were prized once again at the IPA Awards.

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Photo Annual Awards 2013, 2nd Place

With the intention of raising awareness about the growing problem of plastic in the sea, I carried out a new studio work, and this received second place at the Annual Prague in 2013.

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IPA AWARDS 2013, Honorable Mentions

Following on from this was the International Photography Awards, together with other works.

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Hasselblad Masters 2014, Finalist

Shortly afterwards, the first images from a new body of work entitled ‘In Between’ , more abstract and certainly more experimental than previous works, were classified amongst the ten finalists in the Hasselblad Masters in Fine Art.

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IPA AWARDS 2014, 3rd place in NightScape and selected for The Best of Show curated by David Clarke Head of Photography at Tate

In 2014 I created the series ‘A Van at the Sea’, a series of images I made before going to sleep in my camper van on the Portuguese coast, as well as being featured in the Italian national newspaper, La Repubblica, and also published by many magazine and blogs, made it into the winners of IPA AWARDS in 2014.

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9th Black and White Spider Awards

A month after, an image of a new body of work done from one cliff during a few strong storms,  got a 4th place while others were nominated.