Camarillo : Student’s Photo Wins Honors in National PTA Competition

Jamie Warner doesn’t let his mind drift when he goes cloud-watching.

“You have to concentrate on what you’re doing or you might miss a good shot,” said Jamie, an eighth-grader at Monte Vista Intermediate School in Camarillo.

His strategy paid off this week when he won first place in a photography contest sponsored by the National PTA.

His entry, a black-and-white shot of a circle of pillars reaching toward a cloud-studded sky, was one of 500,000 submitted by students nationwide, said Sonia Evans, who helped organize the annual contest. Other categories included music, literature and visual arts.

Evans said Jamie’s photograph, chosen from among 48 junior high school entries that made it to the national level, is an excellent interpretation of the contest’s theme, “Where does the sky end?”

Jamie, a soft-spoken 13-year-old who said he prefers snapping pictures to academic studies, got the photograph by lying within a sculpture outside an Oxnard office building last September as part of a class assignment.

“I just thought it would turn out to be a weird picture. It was just an experiment,” said Jamie, who took the photograph with a Minolta 35mm camera owned by his father, Jim Warner.

Although he has long enjoyed taking pictures during family vacations, Jamie said, he had no real experience with cameras until he took a one-semester elective in photography offered at Monte Vista. That course sparked his interest in photography.

“I didn’t know you could have so much fun at it,” Jamie said.

His first-place achievement has already caught the attention of other students at the school, where demand for the photography elective has led school officials to offer two sessions next year.