Beer photo contest

Celebrator correspondent Chuck Cook returned from his most recent trip to Belgium (18th and counting) with over 1,500 digital photos.

Learning that, I checked my statistics at the photo sharing/web 2.0 site Flickr. I have 7,185 photos stored there, but that's an accumulation from over several years. Of those, 3,280 have been publicly viewed. There are 1,936 that I have yet to tag with at least the word "beer". My most-viewed photo is of a model dressed totally in pastry and candy as Ariel the Mermaid. My most-viewed beer photo is of the now-demolished facade of Dr. Dremo's beer bar in Arlington, Va.

When bloggers Stonch in the UK and A Good Beer Blog in Canada announced the 3rd annual Christmas Beer Photo Contest, I knew it might be difficult to winnow down my collection to a select few. (The contest occurs during the Christmas season, and some nice goodies are awarded for the winner. But the photos need not be of Christmas beers, just great shots in which beer is involved.)

Many of the images are simple photo-documents of beer events and persons. But I did manage to select four interesting (at least I believed so!) images which I emailed in ... at the very last minute.

Without any doubt, I may have missed some interesting photos. Here, for example are four I did not submit:

The submission deadline was yesterday. 524 images were entered. And the winner was ....? Well, as Stonch wrote:

It's going to take us a while to sort through all those photos and choose the winners. Feel free to pitch in with your suggestions, but don't expect us to be influenced by the voice of the mob. We're both lawyers, you see, and as such we're all about due process (that, and thinking we know best).

I didn't make the cut. Update here.