"Bushwick Man" won Brooke Goldyn the Digital Best of Show award from 614 digital images submitted in the Youth Photography Contest. She is a junior at Center for Creative Arts.More Info
For more information about the Photographic Society of Chattanooga, go to its website at chattanoogaphoto.org.
"From Quantity Comes Quality" is a sign teacher Lauren Leutwiler has posted in the photography studio at Chattanooga Christian School.
It not only reinforces the adage that practice makes perfect, it encourages students "to make lots of art," says Leutwiler.
Teenagers Nathanael Kapp and Brooke Goldyn do just that.
While most of their peers are documenting their lives through selfies, these two say they are more interested in capturing the world around them through photographs of interesting people, landscapes or candid photos of their friends.
From the hundreds of shots these two take each month came two photos that won Nathanael and Brooke Best of Show Awards in the annual Youth Photography Showcase, sponsored by the Photographic Society of Chattanooga.
For Nathanael, it was quite an auspicious debut to win Print Best of Show in his first competition in his first semester taking a photography class. This was Brooke's second year to enter the contest after bringing home a first-place award last year. This year she was awarded Digital Best of Show.
Nathanael, son of Duane and Cristol Kapp, is a 15-year-old sophomore at Chattanooga Christian, where he's an outfielder on the baseball team.
Brooke, daughter of Eva and Kyle Goldyn, is a 16-year-old junior at Center for Creative Arts. At CCA, she is a visual arts major. Her talent isn't limited to photography; she also paints, draws and sculpts.
Pat Gordy, director of the Youth Photography Showcase, says a total of 819 images were submitted from 148 students representing 14 area high schools. This is the 10th year the contest has been held and is open to students in grades 9 to 12.
"I think it is a wonderful thing to get young people involved in a lifetime hobby such as photography," says Gordy. "Some may even make a career of it."
To encourage their interest, all students who enter the contest are given a complimentary membership in the Photographic Society of Chattanooga. Best of Show winners each receive $100 cash and a ribbon; other prize winners are awarded ribbons.
Nathanael says he began taking photos a year ago after hanging out with his dad, a photography hobbyist. Now the father-son duo go out multiple times a month to photograph interesting things around Chattanooga or on short day trips.
Nathanael, who shoots with a Nikon D3300, says he prefers taking pictures of nature.
"I like waterfalls," he says. "Whenever we go to the Smokies, we try to find waterfalls to take pictures of.
"I like landscapes and taking pictures of things you wouldn't normally think to take a picture of. Old stuff is pretty cool to take pictures of, too; I got an honorable mention for an old rusted gear on a fence," says the sophomore.
However, he recently saved the money to buy a lens with the goal of starting a portrait business this summer. He says he'll begin with shooting photos of neighborhood children and expand from that.
His winning photo is his perspective of reflections in the Tennessee River.
"I decided it would be cool to take pictures at night with my dad," says Nathanael. "We walked around Chattanooga, went to the North Shore and Coolidge Park to get a picture of the city at night.
There is a pier near Renaissance Park that sticks out over the water. I stood on it and shot across the river toward the aquarium and Market Street Bridge, and you can see their reflection in the river."
Leutwiler says "Nathanael understands camera operation, the cause and effect of technical photography, better than most high school students. His degree of ease with dealing with camera exposure and effect vaults him into a higher level of 'kid with a camera.'"
It was also a family member who stirred Brooke's interest in photography two years ago. After watching her older sister, Brooke took a Photography 1 class at school, began honing her skills, then spent two weeks last summer attending a photography class at the International Center of Photography in New York City. That's where she photographed her winning entry in the contest, using her Canon Rebel T5 camera.
"We were in Brooklyn and the man was behind a fence, watering a garden. When I first took it, I was attracted to the composition of it; I liked it even more after I cropped the width of it a little," says the CCA student, who shot more than 1,000 frames during the two-week class. "I named it 'Bushwick Man' because that's where we were in Brooklyn when I took it."
When she showed the shot to her CCA photography teacher, Justin Black, he told her the photo demonstrated the Fibonacci sequence. In math, that's a sequence of numbers in which each subsequent number is the sum of the previous two, a stairstep of sorts. In art, the Fibonacci series is a spiral, a stairstep of squares that lead the eye in a path around the image - which is obvious even to the untrained eye when viewing "Bushwick Man."
"Bushwick Man" is representative of the "candid people photos" the CCA junior says she most enjoys shooting, the spontaneous photo "that wasn't planned."
Contact Susan Pierce at spierce@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6284.