Awards: Honorable Mentions | Smartphone | Landscape/nature | Artistic/abstract | People in the moment | Places | Grand prizeWelcome to Desert Companion’s second annual “Focus on Nevada” photo contest. A quick note before you feast your eyes on the pages of terrific imagery that follow: This year, to bring a heightened mojo to these proceedings, we enlisted a cohort of judges — folks whose aesthetic sophistication jumped the decision-making process to a new level.

Awards: Honorable Mentions | Smartphone | Landscape/nature | Artistic/abstract | People in the moment | Places | Grand prizeWelcome to Desert Companion’s second annual “Focus on Nevada” photo contest. A quick note before you feast your eyes on the pages of terrific imagery that follow: This year, to bring a heightened mojo to these proceedings, we enlisted a cohort of judges — folks whose aesthetic sophistication jumped the decision-making process to a new level.

Photography by Linda alterwitz (l) fine art , Aaron mayes (A) people, and Jakob McCarthy (J) architecture Why shoot Maryland Parkway instead of, you know, that other big, insanely photogenic street a few miles away? Why, when we assigned these three photographers to capture that elusive quality known as sense of place, did we opt for the understudy instead of the diva? Easy. Visual as the Strip is, we didn’t want the usual dream-factory celebrations.