Costco Connection - March 2008

First Place United States

Mary Sytsma Wheaton, Illinois

The face of
a country

Mary Sytsma’s trip to Nigeria, where she took her winning photo, began as an assignment she gave to her students to create awareness of the AIDS pandemic. “You’ve got to care about the world,” says Sytsma, a teacher at Elmhurst College in Elmhurst, Illinois. “It’s not just about you. It’s about serving the world.”

One thing led to another, and last January she traveled to Nigeria as a board member of the Gwaimen Center ( www.thegwaimencen ter.org), a grassroots sustainability center that offers hope and a promise of help to AIDS widows and orphans.

In one of her meetings, as she was waiting to address the women, she turned her head and saw a young girl, whose photo she then took.

“Fracah’s [Frahn-kah] face spoke volumes to me about the hardness of a life that so many women face there,” says Sytsma, who has since returned to Nigeria a second time. “To me, she is saying, ‘Don’t forget about us. Come and help us. We need the world to know.’ ”

For her first-place photo, Sytsma received a $1,500 Costco Cash card, which she has used to purchase supplies for the villages, such as aspirin, blood pressure and diabetes monitors and children’s vitamins.—TFJ

Elvis has left the
building (behind)

Does Elvis live? Well, The King may have moved on, but the Elvis Presley Memorial Chapel, the subject of the second-place photo by Costco member Jeff Fennell, endures. Survivor of two fires, the church, with aptly named Superstition Mountain in the background, was used in the movie Charro!, a 1969 western starring Elvis.

To achieve the heightened clarity of the photo, Fennell employed an age-old photographer’s trick known as high dynamic range: He snapped five different shots in a row, at different exposures, which allowed him to get the best lighting for each object in each shot before blending all five into one picture.

“You expose each shot for the bright parts,” says Fennell, a part-time biology teacher and part-time photographer in Oregon (jeffd fennellphotography.com). Fittingly, this tech-

nique was used by Hollywood cameramen back in the day, who, when shooting westerns, wanted to be able to get the face of the cowboy and the sunset.

For his second-place photo, Fennell received a $1,000 Costco Cash card.—TFJ

Second Place United States

Jeff Fennell Albany, Oregon

Emperors on ice

Costco member Keith Szafranski, a professional photographer in Livingston, Montana, traveled nearly two weeks, first by plane, then by boat, through increasingly inhospitable environs to Antarctica to get this shot.