CALLIE CHEE
Winner – Travel and overall winner - Australasia's Top Emerging Photographer
Callie Chee likes to think of herself as a landscape and travel photographer. Whenever time allows, she love venturing into weird and wonderful places to capture the unique culture and colours of the country. To her, it makes perfect sense to just go where her heart takes her. Her travels have taken her to the Badain Jaran Desert in Inner Mongolia, Kashmir, India, sea gypsy settlement in Borneo, mudflats of Xiapu, and beyond. To date, her work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, London, Kuala Lumpur, and throughout Australia. In her spare moments, she also leads photography tours to less-explored destinations.
www.CallieCheePhotography.com
Overall winner prize: Fujifilm X-T3 and XF18-55mm lens valued at $3,298, plus $1,500.
Category prize: $1,000 cash, DJI Mavic Mini Fly More Combo valued at $799, and Fujifilm XF10 valued at $799.
PROUDLY SPONSORED BY: DJI
MAJOR SPONSOR: Fujifilm
What the judges thought
These works leaped off the screen because of their clarity, simplicity, and elegance. Beautiful composition, and with a subtle colour palette, these works speak of restrained but sophisticated post production skills too. A new talent to watch for! – John Gollings AM
This set of images works incredibly cohesively as a folio. Each image presents with a beautifully balanced composition, a very deliberate sense of timing and subject placement, and conveys an enticing sense of quietness and poise. There’s a wonderfully delicate graphical quality to each image which separately emphasises vertical, circular, and horizontal lines, and a colour palette of soft pastel tones that weaves through the set and adds a deliciously painterly feel to the folio. A very worthy winner! – Paul Hoelen
This series of images has just about everything for me. For starters, the colour palette. The photographer has understood how to blend the images together, giving each one equal importance and a unique flavour.
The content of the imagery, while not totally unknown to the viewer, has been looked at by a really keen eye, giving it a point of view that is outstanding and individual.
The less-is-more concept is prevalent in this body of work too. The photographer has kept the beauty and simplicity, combining it with graphic elements, all the while managing not to overcomplicate the work.
To that end, this body of work is highly praiseworthy. It shows the maturity of the photographer in being able to create such images, keeping them calm and still, and enhancing the beauty of the scene, not compromising it. – Sally Brownbill