Student’s pictures place 1st, 2nd in photo contest

For two local students, a snap of the shutter earned them awards and captured a magazine cover featuring their photos.

Adam Eich, 17, of Sagle, won first place in the youth division of the 2004 Idaho Magazine Photo Contest. His winning entry will appear on the July 2005 issue of the magazine. Kelly Cox, 19, won second place, youth division, and her photo appeared on the March 2005 cover. It was a second win for Cox, who took first place in the 2003 contest.

Eich was just shooting candids with a “point-and-shoot” digital camera of a Fourth of July get-together on the St. Joe River last summer when he snapped a photo of two friends wearing red, white and blue top hats. “It had just a warm, summery, Fourth-of-July kind of feel,” he said.

His mother, Ruth Eich, a photographer and owner of Windward Studio in Sandpoint, “had to really convince me to send it in. It’s horizontal; they usually only use verticals, but they cropped it really good,” he said.

“I had wanted to send in a different one of a little boy I shot at a wedding,” said Eich, who works for his mother and takes candid photos at weddings.

Cox, a North Idaho College student, also works for Windward Studio. Her winning entry was shot on her family’s ranch in Sandpoint and shows two men in cowboy hats – her brother and his friend – sitting on the corral fence, their backs to the camera. She used a Nikon and 400 speed film.

“We’d just built that coral, and I wanted to do something artsy. I wanted to mirror the image of the first one. I liked the cowboy theme,” she said. Her “first one” was the entry that won first place in the 2003 contest and showed a silhouette of her father leaning against a fence on their ranch.

“One of the criteria (of the photo contest) is that it has to have a person in the photos. They don’t have to be the center of the photo,” said Kitty Fleischman, Idaho Magazine editor and publisher. And, of course, the photo has to be shot in Idaho.

Judging was done by Fleischman and other magazine staff members. She said they kept calling in more people for input, but rather than narrowing down the field, it only added more photos. “It’s really hard to pick,” she said.

Both Eich and Cox are considering careers in photography. This summer will be Eich’s fourth working at Windward shooting weddings. The Sandpoint High School student turns 18 this July. He’s a photographer for The Cedar Post, his school paper, and is chief editor for the yearbook.

Besides photography, he likes video and likes to mix the two, for instance putting a video together out of stills. “Video is faster. There’s movement, sound. I like editing on the computer. I can do special effects,” he said.

With photography he likes taking candid rather than posed shots. “I like to be the guy they don’t know is there. “I use a 300 or 500 mm lens. I get candids. That’s when you get the best pictures, when they don’t know it.”

Like Eich, Cox also likes shooting candid photos. “It’s more of a true story of what happened,” she said. She likes taking photos of people, especially babies.

“I really like how everyone’s pictures look totally different. There’s so much variation in the world,” she said. Her favorite thing about photography is shooting black and white and working in the darkroom.

“Definitely black and white is my forte. I like the authentic look. It’s more in the past. People connect more with black and white.”

She’s attending North Idaho College and will transfer to the University of Idaho in the fall to study elementary education. For the summer, she’ll work at Windward, shooting senior portraits.

“I’m at the crossroads. If I still like it, I probably will go toward photography,” she said.