Arroyos & Foothills Nature Photography Viewer's Choice: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is the Arroyos & Foothills Nature Photography Viewer's Choice, and who runs it?

The Arroyos & Foothills Nature Photography Viewer's Choice is the public honor inside the Nature Photography Contest staged each spring by the Arroyos & Foothills Conservancy, a conservation nonprofit anchored in Pasadena, California, whose correspondence address is P.O. Box 1, Pasadena, CA 91102. The conservancy works along the Arroyo Seco foothills at the western edge of the San Gabriel Valley, and the contest grows out of that local mission rather than out of any media publisher's reader poll.

The ballot lives on the conservancy's own domain at https://arroyosfoothills.org/get-involved/nature-photography-contest/, so the vote is hosted by the nonprofit itself instead of by an outside polling service. Entry is open to anyone over the age of 15, amateur and professional photographers alike, and the conservancy presents the contest as an annual fixture.

Where the conservancy works

The preserve roster supplies the contest's subjects: Cottonwood Canyon, Millard Canyon, Rosemont, Rubio Canyon, Sunshine Sycamore Canyon and the Chaney Trail Corridor, alongside smaller conservation areas. Program lines include buying and connecting land, habitat restoration, urban wildlife research, conservation through education, the Monarch Recovery Project and Backyard Biodiversity, which means the photographs competing for votes show the very landscapes and wildlife the organization protects.

Which editions have run, and when does the current window fall?

Printed history on the contest page reaches back to 2022. Neal Parekh took the Viewer's Choice honor in the 2022 contest, and Andrea Donnellan won it in 2024; across the judged categories the roles reverse, with Donnellan a category winner in 2022 and Parekh a category winner in 2024. A 2025 contest followed, and the 2026 contest has now closed, its winners posted with the Viewer's Choice vote running beneath them.

The 2026 judging panel brought back Denis Callet, Althea Edwards and Neal Parekh. In the current winners gallery, Donnellan's Spring is in the Air carries both the Viewer's Choice honor and the Mammals Category win, while TJ Hastings' Red Diamond Rattlesnake took the Other Wildlife honor; Hastings is a senior at Occidental College majoring in Biology and researching how conservation grazing shapes wildlife habitat.

The page leaves out three things a careful supporter would want: the day-level calendar showing when the vote opens and shuts, the full roster of contest categories, and any stated limit on how many picks one person may cast or on who qualifies to cast them. Those dates move with each spring season; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How does a supporter cast a vote today?

Casting a vote takes little effort. While the season's ballot is live, the conservancy directs visitors to its contest page with a printed invitation to scroll down to see the winners and to vote in the Viewer's Choice Award. Gallery and ballot share a single page, so studying the judged photographs and backing a favorite happen in the same sitting.

Voting is free, and the page names no fee, no registration step and no residency filter for the people casting picks. Because the nonprofit's arroyosfoothills.org domain carries the ballot directly, the vote sits inside the organization's normal site navigation rather than inside a third-party polling shell, and the closing day travels with the contest itself.

Treat the posted closing day as the hard deadline, and read the ballot itself for any condition an individual season adds.

How does this ballot sit beside its California neighbours?

California's public-vote pages on this site cluster around consumer best-of ballots, where readers crown businesses and restaurants across whole regions. San Diego's readers' poll with its restaurant companion, the Silicon Valley edition and Central Valley Business all follow that publication-driven model, and the same shape governs Marin and Orange County. The nearest neighbor in spirit is the 2024 GGBR Calendar Contest, another California ballot built around photographs rather than storefronts.

This programme differs from that pack in almost every respect a supporter feels. It is run by a single conservancy instead of a media brand, it is anchored to preserved canyon land in the Pasadena foothills, and it splits honors between an expert judging panel and a single Viewer's Choice award rather than spreading many category crowns across local merchants. The audience is correspondingly narrower: a photographer's standing rises or falls on a smaller pool of engaged voters, which is why focused outreach tends to move the result more than sheer volume.

How can a supporter strengthen a photographer's standing?

Outreach here rewards precision over reach. The vote lives on a single page beside the winners gallery, so a shared link sends people straight to the photograph rather than through a signup funnel. Timing matters more than volume: the stretch runs with the results display and closes within the same spring window, so a burst of support early beats a slow drip.

Photographers usually bring their own audiences, from a college researcher profiling rattlesnakes to returning judges with followings of their own. Rallying those circles is the organic core of any campaign. The conservancy publishes no policy on outside assistance, so anything beyond personal outreach rests on the ballot's own terms. For tactics that carry over to public ballots beyond this foothill vote, see the votes guide.