From among 384 entries, a group of Valley News judges selected 24 finalists for the 2016 Valley News Amateur Photography Contest. The finalists were displayed at the HomeLife Expo in Hanover last weekend, where 642 votes were cast to choose the three prize winners.
Dawn Thetford’s grandmother was always fond of chickens.
When Alice McLure and her husband lived on a farm in Boltonville, Vt., they kept poultry. Alice McLure, who died in July at age 93, spent her last years in the Grafton County Nursing Home. One day, Thetford’s uncle brought in some chickens, and chicks, “for her to see and to hold,” said Thetford, who lives in Woodsville.
Thetford, who loves taking photographs, ran home to get her Canon Powershot SX170 IS camera. She’s an avid amateur photographer, and this photograph marks her first entry in the Valley News contest and her first win. A friend encouraged her to enter the image. First prize earned her $100.
At first her grandmother, who was suffering from dementia, was a little hesitant about handling the chicks.
But Thetford told her that it was like riding a bike. “Once you’re used to holding animals you never forget,” she said.
So her grandmother took the chick and held it tenderly, giving Thetford a shot at a picture that poignantly contrasts old age, and infancy.
— Nicola Smith
Much of photography involves slicing time into fractions of a second. Jasper Meyer, 16, takes a different approach, one Stephen Hawking would admire.
For Spinning Through the Cosmos, the Hanover High School sophomore set up his Canon 6D with a 24 mm lens to take 90, one-minute photographs over the course of 90 minutes. He then layered those photographs in a computer program called StarStax, which rendered the movement of the Earth as a screen of shooting stars behind the barn at his family’s Lyme home.
“I really like taking photographs of star trails, because I think they’re really cool to put behind a subject,” said Meyer, who has been taking photographs with intent since a trip to Africa in 2014. He photographed African wildlife, but back home turned his lens on the landscape and the sky. The result is a second prize in his first-ever photo contest entry, and a $75 prize.
— Alex Hanson
During the fall, Charlie Spina prefers to detour from Route 4 onto the back roads on the commute between his home in Wilder and his job at Fine Paints of Europe in Woodstock.
The 36-year-old New Jersey native, who moved to the Upper Valley in 2004, keeps a digital, point-and-shoot Canon Powershot SX-260 at his side for moments such as the one that presented itself early on the morning of Oct. 4, 2012, near the height-of-land on Cloudland Road in Pomfret. He had never entered the photo contest before, but his family urged him to send this one in. The image won him $50.
“I’d seen these horses in the pasture before, but they were never that close to the road. That particular morning, the fog burned off and the light was perfect. The horses were right by the road. I was able to stop and take a great shot. As soon as I crested by the farm, that’s when the sun started burning the clouds off. It was illuminating the white horse just right. The horse just seemed to glow golden.”
— David Corriveau