Longtime Parkites may recognize our second spotlight in this series highlighting Park City Photographers and their award-winning photos: David Winegar, one of the area’s signature eyes for landscape and wildlife photography. At the Intermountain Professional Photographers Association’s 2025 photography competition in November, Winegar won three awards: two first-place awards and one for second place.  Overall, 25 artists entered 205 images in 11 categories. Five Professional Photographers of America-trained Master Judges outside of Utah judged each work using the rigorous 12 Elements of a Merit Image, which evaluate areas such as visual impact, composition, lighting, technical excellence, storytelling and more. “Windswept” won David Winegar first place in the fine art/illustrative category. It depicts phragmites, a common reed, blowing in the wind at Bear River Bird Refuge. David Winegar’s “Windswept” won first place in fine art/illustrative at the Intermountain Professional Photographers Association’s annual photography competition. It depicts phragmites, a common and invasive reed, blowing in the wind at Bear River Bird Refuge. Credit: David Winegar “They’re actually an invasive species,” Winegar said. “You’d think they’re cattails, but they’re different.”  Winegar, who regularly shoots wildlife photography, went to the refuge looking for birds but knew there could be other wildlife, too. On that windy morning, he shot the reeds with a longer exposure to achieve a more abstract look.  “To me, it depicted what I’ve been thinking about. The world these days is just … the tumultuousness of everything that’s going on right now — that was going through my head,” he said.  It’s an image emblematic of Winegar’s body of work. On his website, parkcityphotography.net, visitors can see his portfolio of images that show a similar on-call patience for the moment a scene slips into abstraction — or something else altogether, such as with “Snowstorm Sheet Music,” which won Nature and Wildlife Image of the Year in 2024. It shows birds sitting on branches during a snowstorm in Wanship, appearing like notes on a musical staff.  Another of his images, “Into the Inferno,” won first place for reportage. It shows a DC-10 plane dropping retardant on the Parleys Canyon wildfire that swept 541 acres in 2021, one of the most dramatic wildfires in the history of the Park City area. The retardant is a brilliant orange, billowing truffle-like into a sea of a blue and yellow smoke, creating a surreal image.  David Winegar’s “Into The Inferno” won first place in reportage at the Intermountain Professional Photographers Association’s annual photography competition. It depicts a DC-10 dropping retardant on the 2021 Pinebrook wildfire. Credit: David Winegar Winegar said he had gone to Salt Lake City for an errand when the fire broke out. While driving on Interstate 15, he looked up and saw the fire.  “It looked like a nuclear bomb had gone off above Park City,” he said.  Winegar grabbed his telephoto lens and headed back toward home. He knew he couldn’t interfere with the firefighting or put himself at risk, but he wanted to get a photo if he could. He drove to a nearby mountain and hiked to the summit.  “The fire was way down below, so I just parked my truck and just started hiking up on the north side where I could get a better vantage point.” He watched the traffic on the interstate and made sure it continued to move. If they stopped it, then he’d have to leave, he thought. But thankfully, traffic kept flowing.  “I shot that fire pretty much until dark,” he said.  Part of what Winegar found compelling was one of the planes fighting the fire.  “I flew those in the Air Force, the military version,” he said. “I’m somewhat familiar with how they set that up … and what that DC-10 was doing — coming over the ridge line and then doing the drop — incredible airmanship.” Winegar said the photo was challenging because of the heavy smoke in the air, which required him to manually focus each shot and track the plane as it moved.  The last photo of Winegar’s to win was “Shades of Summer,” which took second in the fine art/illustrative category. It’s a photo of umbrellas on a beach in Camogli, Italy, where Winegar recently vacationed.  David Winegar’s “Shades of Summer” won second place in fine art/illustrative, black and white, at the Intermountain Professional Photographers Association’s annual photography competition. It depicts umbrellas on a beach in Camogli, Italy. Credit: David Winegar Winegar originally shot the black-and-white photo in color. The umbrellas are actually white and orange. He said he submitted the image because it captured the feeling of a relaxing vacation, which is harder to render than it might seem. Vacation photos are notoriously tough to sit through, after all.  “We all have memories of great vacations we’ve taken,” he said. “This was just a very iconic scene. Just a beautiful day with everybody enjoying themselves.”  It helped that his wife, who has a degree in art, liked the photo, too, he said.  Winegar and fellow Park City Photography Club photographer David Breslauer recently did a photography symposium in Moab. The instructors for that were experts in black-and-white photography.  “That’s really become a lot of my focus over the last couple of years,” Winegar said, “I’m really going crazy on black and white because I just think it’s very timeless. You remove the color and you just focus on line, form, shape.” Winegar, like every member of the Park City Photography Club, encourages anyone interested to join the monthly meetings, which run about two hours and are spent sharing work, having discussions and taking photo field trips together. Photographers can reach out to the Park City Photography Club via its Facebook page at facebook.com/groups/ParkCityPhotographyClub. Find more of Winegar’s work at parkcityphotography.net. The post David Winegar finds abstraction in the concrete  appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less