Picture Plymouth Photo Contest Selection for May

LuAnn Weiss loves capturing her children’s lives in pictures. Her 7-year-old daughter Lydia plays summer soccer, which offers many opportunities for memory-laden photographs. Last year, Weiss was at one of Lydia’s games when it began to pour. She’d brought along her camera with a long-range lens and kept it under her coat as the rain started to come down. Thankfully her equipment stayed dry, but the players on the field were drenched. “I thought it was funny how the parents were standing comfortably under their umbrellas while the girls slid around in the mud,” she says. She took at least 50 shots to get this one perfect image that she entered in the Picture Plymouth photo contest. “This shot was taken because Lydia was driving down the field in the middle,” Weiss says. “She loved playing in the rain and got five goals that day, kicking one over the heads of a clump of girls into the goal.” While her daughter had a landmark day on the soccer field, she has a different perspective on the photo she cherishes. “The colored umbrellas make it clear it was raining and add a lot of color to the photo,” Weiss says. “When taking it, I wasn’t aware of them. Happy accident, I guess.” Weiss, who works as a freelance photographer for McGraw-Hill Higher Education, sees “everything in a picture. When I’m outside, I always find myself framing things in my mind to see if they would be an interesting picture or story,” she says.