Green Peace

The Winner of the International Garden Photographer of the Year 2016 Is Lee Acaster. He Talks to Oliver Atwell About His Victorious Image.

- Oliver Atwell

Lee Acaster is name that be familiar to some of you. He’s featured a few times in the pages on AP, and in 2015 took the overall prize in AP’s Amateur Photographer of the Year competition. Now he’s won the 2016 International Garden Photographer of the Year title. He takes home a prize of £7,500. We chatted to him about how it feels to win yet another competition.

How does it feel to have won IGPOTY?

I’m absolutely overwhelmed to have won the competition, particularly with this image as it is very much a shot I took to please myself, and I also think it is quite brave of the IGPOTY judges to choose something that is probably a little less conventional than might be expected. Hopefully, it shows that there is the potential to create interesting images almost anytime and anywhere, which is a great message for the many photographers out there who may not have access to the more conventionally beautiful landscapes.

Can you talk me through this image? What exactly are we seeing here and why did you identify this scene as something that could work as an image?

I had a day to myself in Snowdonia prior to joint-leading a Greg Whitton workshop, so decided to explore Cwm Bychan, a location I hadn’t been to before. It was a rather grim and grey morning so traditional wide landscape shots were not really on the agenda, and in these circumstances I usually look to find details in the landscape that interest me. More often than not, that will mean trees.