“I Can’t Spill It Now” was created by Richard Childress of Austin, Texas. One evening, while sitting down to begin editing some photos, he accidentally spilled a glass of wine and part of it splashed into his monitor. The monitor seemed fine at first but, within a few days, started exhibiting bizarre behavior to the point that it was completely unusable. Having an almost 50-year career as an electrical engineer, the idea of working on electrical devices was not at all intimidating to Richard so he opened the monitor and spent several hours with cotton swabs and rubbing alcohol cleaning semi-dried, gooey wine off of the circuit boards. He related this story to a close friend and fellow photographer several weeks later who thought it was hilarious and sent him the plastic wine glass with the “sippy cup” top along with a note saying, “Maybe you won’t spill it next time” as a joke. After getting a good laugh out of it, Richard thought, “I’m going to use it in a competition image!” The image was shot with a Nikon D850 camera using a 24-70mm lens. It was lit with a small strobe and soft box along with several layers of diffusion material at cameral left, and a piece of white foam board at camera right to serve as a reflector. The image provided the final exhibition merit Richard needed for his Master of Photography degree and won a trophy for Best Commercial Image at the 2025 TPPA Image Competition.