Carol Stream photographer wins contest

You’ve heard about great actors who can “read the phone book” and make it sound like Shakespeare.

Or perhaps a fabulous singer who can warble a grocery list and turn it into a hit.

Well, meet Angela Cichosz, who won our monthly photo contest for March by taking a picture of a dictionary.

It’s more than that, of course. Cichosz, an Elmhurst College student who lives in Carol Stream, actually used a red filter to form a heart-shaped reflection on a page out of Webster’s that features words related to love.

“I remember seeing something in physics class in high school along a similar line,” she says.

She snapped about 15 images with her trusty Canon EOS Rebel XT, she says, before she was able to create “a real harmony between the ‘love’ words and the red shadow.”

Here’s what she wrote with her entry: “This is a physics optical illusion. I took a red camera filter and placed it in the middle indent of a dictionary and took the photo at eye level with light coming through from behind so it cast a shadow of a heart.”

“I was pretty pleased with it,” she says.

So was DuPage Photo Director Scott Sanders.

“I like it because it is a creative and colorful way to illustrate the theme,” he says. “And it isn’t easy to make a page in the dictionary visually interesting.”

Cichosz wins a $50 gift certificate for her efforts from PJ’s Camera, 662 Roosevelt Road, Glen Ellyn.

If you’re a fan of our Photo Finish competition, Cichosz’s name is probably familiar to you. Not only is she a frequent contributor, but this is the third time our photo staff has selected one of her images as our monthly winner.

Cichosz says she bought her first SLR camera about four years ago to take pictures of her “beagle hound” puppy.

She quickly fell in love, both with the pooch and photography.

A psychology major at Elmhurst, she says she’s contemplating a second major in English with the thought of someday becoming a photojournalist.

She also enjoys writing fiction and the occasional poem.

“Those are my two passions,” she says, “writing and photography.”

It’s not unusual to find her strolling through an area forest preserve looking for the perfect shot. And as she demonstrated in the March contest, she’s not afraid to look a little closer to home in her quest for compelling images.

Cichosz says she still has plenty to learn about photography, including some recent challenges — “my computer can be a little stubborn” — to make sure her images have a high enough resolution.

But she knew she had something special when she took a close look at her dictionary picture.

“I was pretty confident in that one,” she says.

And she should have been, because when it comes to our Photo Finish contest, when you look up winner, it’s spelled Cichosz.

About our contest

Each week our Neighbor section includes at least one entry to our Photo Finish photography contest. Our photo staff picks one overall monthly winner to receive a prize. If you would like to submit a photo, e-mail it in .jpg format with at least 300 dpi resolution to ssanders@dailyherald.com. Include your name, address and phone number.