Go to www.heraldguide.com now to submit photos for 2016 contest
It was just the perfect shot for Diane Rochelle and the winning one in the 2015 St. Charles Herald-Guide’s Camera Shootout Contest.
Rochelle and family were at a restaurant with her one and only grandchild (at the time), two-year-old Maddox Rochelle of Covington.
“We were sitting in a restaurant waiting and my little grandson, who wears a hat 99 percent of the time, was looking in a mirror,” Rochelle said. “I like to take a lot of pictures and I just snapped it. When I looked at it, I thought, ‘Wow. This is a really cute picture.’”That’s how it is now for the Destrehan grandmother who’s elated over grabbing her cell phone to capture the moment – a lot. Rochelle, lovingly called “Mimsy” by her grandson, couldn’t resist the moment.
The photo got the most votes and took first place, winning the $500 Wal-Mart gift card prize.
And there have been many moments for this grandmother and her increasingly trigger-happy snapping.
But this photograph was different for Rochelle, who had typically considered herself more a voter than a photo submitter on the Herald-Guide’s Photo Contest, which she had participated in for years as a longtime subscriber of the newspaper. She had an earlier Christmas photo of her grandson that she really liked, but couldn’t get past thinking it’d be a hassle to ask everyone to vote for her photo.
This time, circumstances added up in Grandma Mimsy’s mind that meant one thing – it was time to act.
Family and friends encouraged her to submit the interesting photo. She saw other people submitting photos of their cute kids. She’d learned how easy it was to submit a photo from her cell phone. She was really proud of this photograph. She hadn’t seen any other photo like it in the competition and that felt great, too.
She decided why not go for it this time.
And she did.
“This image was something different and that’s why I sent it in,” Rochelle said. “You’ll never know how you feel about grandchildren until you have them. I’m getting grandkids late because we got married late and my children got married late. When you have grandchildren, they’re just wonderful. You want to take pictures of them all the time.”
Since Maddox’s arrival, Rochelle confessed she hasn’t been able to keep her hands off the camera.
“I have about a thousand more of them,” she mused, offering to show every one of them.
The second-place winner is “Can’t wait to play football” by Amanda Martin of Paradis who shot a photo of Mycal holding a football in the yard on a Saturday.
Martin’s photo came in 219 votes shy of taking first place.Coming in third place is “Bald eagle landing” by Craig Melancon of Destrehan.
Melancon said he was on a swamp tour for photographers in the Bayou Black area and saw five bald eagles among other wildlife and “awesome swamp scenes.”
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