Julie Howden, a photographer who has been working for The Herald for only eighteen months, has been shortlisted from thousands of entries for the prestigious Sony World Photoggraphy Awards.

Her photograph of a player in the 2008 Strachur Swamp Soccer World Championship is one of nine in the professional sport category.

This is the second year of the competition and it has attracted over 36,000 entries from professional photographers all over the world. The three entries selected as finalists from the nine shortlisted will be announced on 17th March and the Awards will be presented at the Sony Photography Awards Festival in Cannes in April.

Julie Howden’s photograph is tactile in the extreme. You can almost feel the damp chill and slime of the mud. The player it features is so mired it could almost be a photograph from World War I trenches. It’s hard enough to see the ball in the photograph. Hard to imagine what it was like in the mud at the time, blinded by flying gobs of the stuff.

See today’s Herald, 25th February, Page 7.