A Prince George native found his focus after landing a spot in a national photography competition.
A fun weekend of camping turned into a pleasant surprise when Parker Andersen received a calendar in the mail last month.
A photo of a copse of birch trees he snapped in a northern Saskatchewan park had been selected as the inside cover shot for the 2012 Nature in Focus calendar, produced in association with David Suzuki's The Nature of Things.
The picture, entitled A Calm Camping Habitat, was already a favourite.
"Everybody seemed to like it," he said.
His mother, Skip Andersen, had even asked for a copy, which she has framed in her home.
"I liked it way before he sent it in," she said proudly at her Oak Street home, where Parker has come to visit for the holidays. The seventh annual Nature in Focus environmental photography competition received more than 3,300 entries.
"In the spring, they told me I was in the top 10 of my category," Andersen said. He didn't hear anything else about the competition until he received the completed calendar by post.
"Once I saw the cover, I realized what had happened, but it was a surprise. It felt pretty good," said Andersen, who currently lives out east where he works in cancer research for the University of Montreal. "Taking photographs of cells is often tougher than taking pictures of trees."
Amateur photographers entered photos in three categories for the competition: Your Habitat, Sacred Species and Acts of Nature.
"All the submitted pictures are on [the competition's] website and when you look at them, some of them are unbelievable," he said.
Andersen said photography is a hobby he has been interested in "forever" and he always has one of his five cameras with him at all times and will set out for a partial day of picture taking when he has the time.
He posts his photos on his website,
www.zerk.ca.
"It makes me want to go out and take more pictures, that's for sure," he said.
The 2012 Nature in Focus calendar is available online at www.cbcshop.ca.
