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HONORARY DISTINCTION
Hon.CPE

John Chapman, EFIAP/p, GMPSA/b, APSEM, ARPS

Country: Australia

My journey in photography began in the late 1970s. Initially I illustrated club magazines and thought a good way to improve was to enter some local photographic competitions. After some local success, I saw a listing for some international exhibitions and thought maybe I could learn even more there. Due to the high cost of postage, I mainly entered slides and had considerable success. During the 1980s I made the PSA Top 10 list in Photojournalism 4 times in a row and won a number of awards. By the late 1980s due to time and other constraints I stopped exhibiting and instead concentrated on images for outdoor magazines and our own books. In all, I have written and illustrated 26 different books totalling 49 editions. The majority of these books are heavily illustrated walking guides.
Professionally, I worked as a university lecturer in Computer Science specializing in graphics and internet programming. When the digital revolution hit photography, I guess I was in a unique position to understand the coding and principles of what digital processing does to images. Early on I wrote my own code to process images but now just use Photoshop and associated programs as pretty much everything I want to do is readily available.

After a 24 year break from exhibiting, I re-started entering international exhibitions in 2013. Not sure why, just thought I would see if my image taking was up to current standards. While it was now very different being all digital instead of slides, I found that my photography was still competitive. In this second period of exhibiting I have had even more success and now have more than 9500 acceptances in 101 different countries. I have won many awards with more than 200 different images in 55 different countries and was awarded the PSA Photo Travel Image of the Year in 2020. I retire most images after they obtain the 3 or 6 acceptances required by the PSA Galaxy system. I have also served as a judge on 9 international exhibitions. My exhibiting is restricted to several months each year as we travel a lot and can be away for up to 6 months at a time. While I do take a wide variety of subject matter, my favoured topic is landscapes.
With exhibition success I have been granted numerous awards around the world like the Hon.CPE. I would like to express my thanks to those who nominated me to win the Hon. CPE award. I would like to wish continued success to the Campina Photographic Exhibitions Society.