by Terri Wiebold

The Castle Pines North Master Association communications staff boasts its very own world champion! Tim Gamble, HOA-1 resident, CPN Master Assocation webmaster, and staff photographer for The Connection, has recently won second place in a Photoshop contest, ranking him number 62 in the world.

“I decided I needed to practice my skills, or they would no longer be skills,” said Gamble. “You have to use it or lose it.” Gamble has been the staff photographer for The Connection for four years. He said he became interested in improving his skills over the past year because The Connection had been doing so much more with photographs and ads, and he wanted to “step things up.” He started taking tutorials from Pod casts and checked out one of the recommended websites, www.photoshoptalent.com.

The website is dedicated to the amazing art of creating and manipulating pictures with Photoshop software. It is comprised of a world-wide talent pool of about 1500 “choppers” who work with photographs, taking a part of one photograph and blending and integrating it with another photograph or image to create something completely unique and original. Anyone registered on the site can then vote on what image is best.

For this particular contest, the rules were “Movie Merging – Use two or more totally unrelated movies and combine them into the most unusual and unique Hollywood movie ever created.” Gamble selected the movies ET and Edward Scissorhands, finishing with ET Scissorhands. The movie poster received the second highest number of votes, earning Gamble a whopping .50 cents in prize money and bragging rights for second place.

First prize was one dollar, according to Gamble. “It’s all about the artwork and how well you did the chop,” he said, “but for me it is about the joke too. It is obviously not about the money,” he laughed.

After only participating for five weeks, and having submitted 27 pieces, Gamble is pleased with how quickly he has moved up the rankings. “I have moved from a level one to a level nine in a very short time,” he said, “something that normally takes years.”

Gamble plans to continue to sharpen his skills and have fun doing it. He said the most important thing he has learned from this experience is that “You can never trust what you see in a photograph…never!”