By Khalida Sarwari
Thirteen-year-old Grace Chung’s pet gecko, Tiger, may not be able to sell affordable car insurance, but what it can do that its more famous reptilian counterpart can’t is take a grand prize-winning photo for the “National Geographic.”
The photo, which depicts a close-up shot of Tiger perched on a branch and licking its right eye, edged out nearly 17,000 other entries from around the world to make its owner and budding photographer the grand prize winner of National Geographic’s international photography contest for kids.
Grace, an eighth-grader at Challenger School, said winning the competition came as a surprise to her. She’d set her expectations so low, in fact, that soon after entering the contest, she’d switched to an email address that was different from the one she’d used to enter. So when National Geographic attempted to notify her, they had to go through other means: like calling her parents, who then broke the exciting news to Grace after school.
“I was really surprised because I definitely wasn’t expecting it at even the national level,” she said. “I had only started photography for about two weeks, so yeah, I definitely wasn’t expecting that.”
Grace took the photo last fall with her new Nikon D3300 that her parents bought her as a gift.
She’d been wanting to take up photography as a hobby and figured she’d start by practicing on her pet gecko. So after watching some tutorials on YouTube and studying National Geographic books, one afternoon she took Tiger out to her backyard, placed it on a small tree and started testing out the settings on her camera and playing around with the aperture and shutter speed.
“My original plan was to just take a simple picture of the gecko,” said Grace. “When I started looking at the eye, I decided to focus on that part. [Then] it stuck out its tongue. I tried to create a really dynamic photo of this gecko.”
The photo, titled “Gecko Eye,” along with the images of the other U.S. first-place winners and second-place contestants will be published in the May 2015 issue of “National Geographic Kids” magazine.
As the grand prize winner of the national round, Grace received a weeklong trip to Costa Rica, a Sony DSC-H300 camera and National Geographic kids books. For winning the international round, she gets a five-day trip to Washington, D.C. and a tour of the National Geographic headquarters. She’s planning to take the Costa Rica trip in July with her family—and yes, her camera so she can indulge in wildlife and macro photography. In Costa Rica, Grace and her family will have a chance to hike through cloud forests, swim in thermal pools, dine in a treehouse and experience up-close encounters with jaguars and ocelots at an animal rescue center. So that camera will definitely come in handy.
Aside from photography, Grace also enjoys horseback riding and playing golf. She resides in Saratoga with her parents and 9-year-old sister, Erin, who also attends Challenger.
According to Rachel Buchholz, editor of National Geographic Kids magazine, this year the contest was expanded to Germany and China and received the largest number of entries worldwide.
“More than ever, photography is a great way for people–and especially kids–to show their perspective on the world,” Buchholz said. “What they produce is funny, creative and sometimes surprising, and we’re excited to see our contest grow more and more each year.”
To view Grace’s photo along with the other winning images, visit natgeo.com/kids/ipc-winners.
