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The judge on the night said it was an "interesting" photo. He also thought it was a little soft, but wondered if this was deliberate. He was right on all counts! It is an interesting image, and it was deliberately a little soft.

In this instance, the soft focus was genuine soft focus, and not photoshop. As a matter of fact, I did not have a soft-focus lens, and made one for the purpose (see the Appendix below).

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APPENDIX: Nick's Homemade Soft-focus lens

A chromatic spherical wonder!

Two 40mm magnifying lens objectives, a body cap, and some 40mm plastic drain pipe fittings. Internal dispersion was controlled by lining the entire thing with black paper. The aperture was set with black plastic discs with a central hole. Some of the aperture disks were further "softened" by drilling a series of small holes around them. These discs were held in place using a cardboard sleeve. Focusing was acheived by means of the threaded section. The lenses were glued into place at the bottom of the outer fitting, leaving a "lens hood" which was used for the cardboard retainer for the discs.

It turns out that this assembly has a focal length of around 64 mm, and the disc used in this photo had an 8mm hole (no auxilliary softening holes) giving an f-ratio of about 8.