Congratulations to Abbye Dahl, Maggie Baynham, and Claire Seaborn for winning the 2009 U-Pass photo contest!

Watch for them in a transit ad near you — each of them won a professional photograph for an ad on a bus and SkyTrain, plus a $200 Vancity Mytreat Visa.

Here are their winning photos with a little description, plus their professional photographs!

Abbye Dahl

Abbye describes her winning photograph:

so an explanation……

well i have to take the bus to and from school everyday (which saves the environment :P)

and every morning when i get on the bus its dark and cold, and everyday when i take the bus home its dark and cold.

but believe it or not, i enjoy waiting at the bus stop in the dark! i love watching all the lights go by, which isn’t that exciting during the day.

so its a photo i’ve been wanting to take for a long, and this gave me a reason to get out and do it! it also gave me a chance to play around with long shutter speeds.

Maggie Baynham

Maggie describes her winning photograph:

The photo is from an amazing conference I went to a few years ago – it was the National Sustainable Campuses Conference, and was held in Charlottetown, PEI.

About a hundred students who were working on sustainability-related projects at their colleges and universities across Canada came together to attend workshops and learn from each other, and it was an entirely youth-run event. The legacy project was planting trees for the campus, and the picture I submitted captures the satisfaction of getting our hands dirty and leaving the world a better place.

Claire Seaborn

Claire describes her winning photograph:

When I found out about the contest, I made a Facebook group to brainstorm ideas for the photo. I got quite a few ideas since 150 people joined the group, and I decided I wanted to take a photo including some of my friends.

My friend Robyn actually came up with the idea for the final photo – a bunch of people stuffed into a car, who were meant to be carpooling since they couldn’t take the bus. It was inspired by the TransLink advertisement that expresses the large proportional of single occupant vehicles versus carpoolers and people who take transit.

We attached bikes to the back, had someone sticking out of the trunk, and people pressed up against the windows. You can’t see it in the final photo, but there is actually a golden retriever sitting next to me in the front seat. I added the caption “can’t bus? carpool!” to be sure that the contest judges knew how much I liked to take transit, and how I saw carpooling as a second option.