Taking Home the Gold

Students win awards in photo and design competitions

Walsworth congratulates the students from Walsworth schools who have won awards in the National Scholastic Press Association’s Picture of the Year and Design of the Year contests.

Students from three Walsworth schools took home awards in the 2002 Picture of the Year contest sponsored by the National Scholastic Press Association (NSPA) and the National Press Photographers Association.

Students from Walsworth schools swept the Feature Picture category, with photographers from the Lair yearbook staff at Shawnee Mission Northwest High School, Shawnee, Kan., taking home the top two awards. Ellie Simms won first place, and Michael Wolfe placed second. Raquel Cervantes, photographer at Thomas Downey High School, Modesto, Calif., rounded out the category, winning third place for her work in the Shield.

NSPA received 86 entries in the Feature and Sports Picture categories of this year’s competition and 45 in the News Picture category, said Jessica Hampton, contest and critique coordinator for NSPA and the Associated Collegiate Press.

Cervantes, who snapped a picture of a young girl looking in a mirror while on a Christmas shopping trip for underprivileged children, said winning the award was a real selfesteem booster.

“Even though I had been told I could take good pictures, this convinced me of it,” she said. “It makes me want to go out and take more.”

Cervantes’ classmate Lynessa Cook also won an award for her photography — first place in the News Picture category.

In the Sports Picture category, Elisa Walling won third place for her work in the Lion at St. Helens High School, St. Helens, Ore.

All winners will receive plaques and recognition on NSPA’s website, www.studentpress.org/nspa, and their work will be published in next fall’s Best of the High School Press.

In the Design of the Year competition, sponsored by NSPA and Adobe Systems Incorporated, students from Walsworth schools took home both second and third place awards in the Yearbook Page/Spread category and second place in the Infographic/Illustration category.

The contest was open to all NSPA members, and NSPA received many entries in each of the five categories, contest coordinator Hampton said.

In the Yearbook Page/Spread category, which received 40 entries, Jennifer Goldberg and Eric Hsu from Thousand Oaks High School, Thousand Oaks, Calif., placed second for their work on the Lancer Legend; and Steven Ounanian from Arrowhead Christian Academy, Redlands, Calif., placed third for his work on Wings.

Ounanian, whose design appeared on pages 44-45 of Wings, said he tried to give the design for the spread about stress the feeling of a card game by laying some pieces out symmetrically and others more freely, such as the bent headline and subhead.

“The story describes the conflict of wanting to be involved in school activities but then missing so much actual class because of it,” he said. “The concept of these people’s activities, in turn lives, are projected onto cards showing the sort of shuffling game that high school can be.”

In the Infographic/Illustration category, Kerryn Miller from Mead High School, Spokane, Wash., placed second out of 71 entries for her work on the Pantera.

Miller described her illustration by saying, “It’s like a piece of liquid that’s forming into a person. With the definition of chaos, it just kind of came into my head.”

All winners will receive plaques, and the first-place winner in each category also will receive the latest version of Adobe InDesign, Hampton said.

The NSPA created the Design of the Year competition to recognize individual achievement. The competition has five categories: Newspaper Page One, Newspaper/ Newsmagazine Page/Spread, Literary Magazine Page/Spread, Yearbook Page/Spread, and Infographic/ Illustration.

“This contest gave us a way to recognize individual students,” Hampton said. “It is one of the only awards we have that are for individual students.”

Entry forms for next year’s picture and design competitions will be available in April and are due Aug. 29.