An eye for eye-catching images

This year’s winning photos in the ANR Amateur Photo Contest were taken with everything from high-end cameras with special lenses to cell phones, but whether the images were captured with a DSLR at precise settings or snapped in the spur of the moment on an i-Phone, all show an eye for framing, subject matter and all the other elements of a great photograph. 
Take, for instance the grand champion photo of a Black Hills sunrise taken last September by Aurora High School yearbook sponsor Rod Havens. That photo, which was also the winner of the Sunrise/Sunset division, was taken with Havens’s Canon EOM R10 mirrorless camera. 
The picture is from an early morning photo shoot Havens went on as part of the Black Hills Photo Shootout which took him to the Hot Springs area in the southern Hills. The picture was captured just as the sun broke through the trees over Cold Brook Reservoir just north of town and features an “in camera” starburst effect Havens has worked to perfect. 
“We got there, drove in in the dark, and just kind of waited it out,” Havens said. “I just really kind of fell in love with trying to capture that starburst on the sunrises, and stopping down the aperture to make that happen is pretty cool.”
Havens captured the image in manual mode using a 24 mm lens and with the aperture clamped down to f16 and a shutter speed of 1/400.
Another photo by Havens taken during the same outing took second place in the Wildlife/Pets division. That image is a close-up photo of a white mountain goat standing in brush. Havens’s keen hearing played a part in capturing that image. 
“That was on a sunrise shoot, and there were a few of us there... I guess, maybe half a dozen, and we were all focused on the landscape,” he said. “We had our wide angle lenses on and those sort of things. And I heard that rustling around the corner in the trees, and walked up around there, and there he was. I rushed back to the vehicle and got the long lens, and he wasn’t really that far, but he had absolutely no qualms about sitting there and lunching on his breakfast while I was able to snap that.”
The goat photo was also shot in manual mode at 1/25th of a second at f6.3. The lens was zoomed in to 500mm. 
Havens said he has been interested in photography since high school and has used it in getting his journalism endorsement in college and his career as a teacher and yearbook sponsor. Noting that he grew up shooting wildlife “in a different way,” as a waterfowl hunter, since developing his photography hobby he has become preoccupied with looking at the world through the lens of a camera. 
“Seeing the wildlife and the landscape through the lens, it’s been fun, kind of almost therapeutic,” Havens said. “Everything just kind of goes away when I’m in that viewfinder, so it’s been really neat.”
“You know, it’s been fun seeing the kids get involved in it and those sort of things,” he said. “But you know, just lately – it was about two years ago – Mr. (Doug) Kittle recommended me for a grant group, and it’s called a Community Catalyst group. It’s actually through a Buffett Foundation, but it’s a grant that lets people who are involved in the community invest in themselves. So I was given a grant called an Individual Development Project, an IDP, to kind of invest in my own photography. I’d always done the photography with the kids and teaching and that, but never really had a chance to, or had never taken the chance to pursue it for myself. So I kind of developed a project centered around landscape and wildlife photography. I was able to take a trip to Yosemite, and that was a photography workshop with a gentleman out there named John Bozema. He’s a landscape photographer, and that ended up being a one-on-one workshop for about four or five days. And we just made all of the rounds in Yosemite, which was just amazing.”
Havens said some of the money from the grant also went to fund his trip to the Black Hills where the two winning photos were shot.

Bird on the wing
Another local photo hobbyist with both first and second place photos in the contest is Edgerton Explorit Center Educator Deb Miller. She was on the road in Belleview with the center’s Explorit Zone traveling exhibit when ANR caught up with her last week and said her travels give her opportunities to shoot photos in lots of different locations. 
Miller’s stop motion photo of a burrowing owl on the wing took first place in the Action Category. She said that image was captured on her Canon EOS R7 Mark II using her car as a sort of photo blind. 
“Well, of course, the mirrorless R7 has a very fast processor,” she said. “So once I spotted him... and the computer technology in that is amazing, because when you kind of follow them, it will actually keep location on it and put it in focus as it’s flying around. So with that one I had gone out to this prairie dog town south of Aurora in Clay County. It’s down right across from Harvard... I always go down there just to see if there’s any burrowing owls, because that’s the habitat that they live in, and I’ve been scanning those little prairie dog burrows for the longest time, and I just happened to look and there was this little guy sitting on the fence post. And so I kind of creeped up in my car, and then he flew off and landed on a burrow. I kind of spotted him, and was keeping an eye on him, and then he started flying and he came up and he flew back and behind me and landed on a post, so that’s where I caught him.”
Miller took second place in the Forced Perspective category with a photo taken in front of western Nebraska’s Chimney Rock, in which she appears to have her finger placed on the very tip of the spire. She said that photo was taken on a cell phone during her travels for the Edgerton. 
“Because we travel through the Edgerton Center, we always kind of document our trips,” she said. “And I’m always taking photos, and so I thought it would be kind of cute if we just did some kind of a cute little photo... I’ve always been intrigued with Chimney Rock anyway, because anytime I come just to see this historic part of it, and they put in this new trail that you could get a little bit closer to it, instead of so far away. So I hiked up on the trail, and I had my co-worker with me, and I said, ‘You know, let’s just do this. Let’s see if I can line it up and put my finger looking like I’m touching the top of Chimney Rock.’ And so we laughed about it, and said, ‘You know what? That just kind of showed where we travel for our work.’”

Hamilton County rust
The winning photo in the Hamilton County division, a photo of an old and rusting grain bin at an abandoned farmstead in the southwestern part of the county near Doniphan, was actually shot on an iPhone 13 as part of Sara Sohrweid’s work for State Farm Insurance. 
“I had to go out and look at a farmstead and take pictures to do insurance for this place, because the owner had just died, and we had to rewrite it for family as an estate thing,” she said. “I had to go out and retake pictures... and I was like, this is pretty dang cool! So, I got their permission, and I took pictures, and I showed them to his family, when I talked to them...  (The late owner) was this old guy that, you know, didn’t like anybody. He was a retired vet, and he only liked me, and liked to talk to me, and I felt sad going out there, so I just wanted to take pictures and just kind of remember.”
Sohrweid said she sees the photo taken in the late fall as a kind of metaphor for the solitude and work ethic that can be a part of life in Nebraska. 
“It felt like what rural Nebraska feels like sometimes, kind of lonely and dreary, but also everybody works so hard to make sure that they have their things taken care of and things done,” she said.  

Bridge to perspective
Meanwhile, Priscilla Balasa’s photo of a curving foot bridge at the Crane Trust near Alda was the first place winner in the Forced Perspective category. An avid photographer, the Aurora resident who teaches in Grand Island Public Schools, submitted photos in several categories and included pictures of bull riding and sunset pictures, but she said her favorite genre is rodeo action, noting that during a rodeo she sees it mostly through the lens of her Canon EOS 5D Mark III. 
That’s the camera Balasa used to take the photo of the walking bridge that won her first place. 
“Well, quite a few years ago I had taken a picture of that walking bridge before it had vegetation around it, and it was just great photo, because it looked like, you know, this could be the beginning of something, or this could be the end of something,” she said. “I thought, ‘I’m going to refresh that, because I hadn’t seen it in a long time.”
Balasa said she was bothered a bit by the placement of a sign at the far end of the bridge, but doesn’t like to do much editing on her photos. 
“Well, this is my opinion, but if you’re gonna go into Photoshop and do big alterations, I think sometimes it takes away from the realism of the photo. That’s just for me.”

Bunny in her pocket
Phillips area resident Kim Trumble’s winning photo of her month-old colt “Bunny” taken this spring was a spur-of-the-moment snapshot on her Samsung Galaxy smart phone, but the framing of the young horse’s face between two posts won the judges over to award her first place in the Wildlife/Pets division. 
“The farrier was there that day, and I just happened to turn around, and she was right there in that corner between those posts and I just took a picture. It turned out pretty good,” Trumble said... I just happened to be there at the right time when she was in that corner. And I just said, Oh, I thought, I’ll take a picture, and let’s see how it turns out.”
Trumble said Bunny is three months old now and is still just as cute, curious and friendly. 
“She’s pretty sweet,” Trumble said, “She’s kind of an ‘in your pocket’ type of colt. She comes to you when you call her and she loves pets and scratches.” 
Trumble said she doesn’t consider photography one of her hobbies, but it’s clear she has an eye for a great photo when she sees one.

Other photo contest finishers
In addition to Havens’s second place mountain goat picture in Wildlife/Pets and Miller’s runner up photo in Forced Perspective, other second place finishers included Tina Warner of Aurora in Sunrise/Sunset, for a photo of sunrise on the opening morning of pheasant season and also in Action for a photo of her dog, Sadie, on her very first pheasant hunt and Nicole Thies Alder of Giltner in the Hamilton County Category for a photo of a child helping daddy with the gardening at Alder Plant Nursery.