East – March 2026 – Portrait

Judges Comments

This was another really light category, and the first-place picture stood out among the rest for the use of lighting, motion blur and clean background. Second place was a nice storytelling shot of a blind guy and his seeing-eye dog. Nice light. We got a sense of the subject's personality in the third-place picture, but would have preferred a horizontal showing more of his environment. We wish we had more entries to choose from here, as most were routine.

Judges: Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group, Laura Oda/Bay Area News Group, Paola Chapdelaine/freelance