Warrenville photographer captures winning shot of Matterhorn
When someone asks Sharon Goodman if she’s been anywhere interesting lately, she probably can’t help but smile.
Well, yeah, she might say. You know, the usual places: India, Switzerland, Rio.
A longtime Warrenville resident, Sharon is married to Maury Goodman, a former city alderman and a high-energy physicist at Argonne National Laboratory.
Maury usually is working on several different experiments in different parts of the world and his job requires lots and lots of travel.
Sharon often accompanied him when they were younger, and now that she’s retired she’s become an even more frequent traveling companion.
For a shutterbug, it’s a perfect opportunity to combine her love of travel with her passion for photography.
That mixture paid off in August when her photograph of the Matterhorn was selected by our photo staff as the month’s top picture in the Daily Herald’s Photo Finish contest.
For her efforts, Sharon will receive a $50 gift certificate from PJ’s Camera, 662 Roosevelt Road, Glen Ellyn.
A former library board president in Warrenville, Sharon says she read Mark Twain’s “A Tramp Abroad” in which he described walking the Riffelberg Trail near the famous mountain. So when she and Maury were in Switzerland a while back, they took the trail, too, but found the mountain shrouded in clouds.
The next morning they woke around 6 a.m., threw open the doors to their hotel room and stepped out on the chilly second-floor balcony. And there, in all its glory, was the sun-drenched Matterhorn.
“It was a perfect view,” she says. “The sun just highlighted the peak and it looked golden. It reminded me of the pyramids of Egypt. But this was not man-made, it was God-made.”
She was able to snap about 10 pictures with her Canon PowerShot XX2015 before the clouds returned to once again shroud the peak in mystery.
She checked her images and thought the third one was “just perfect.”
DuPage Photo Director Scott Sanders agrees.
“I’ve seen many photos of mountains, but not one like this,” Sanders says. “The photographer knew a good photo when she saw it. The composition is very clean with no clutter, and leads the viewer’s eye right to the top of the mountain. The subdued color of the trees and the areas of the mountain in shadow make the sunlit top really spectacular.”
Sharon says she’s been taking photographs for a long time. She took classes at Columbia College before she had her children, she says, and even ran a photo lab for a hospital association. She still does some studio work for her family.
But she says she wasn’t very familiar with the camera she used to capture the winning shot.
Her favorite camera recently was stolen at O’Hare Airport, she says, and this Canon was almost brand new. She spent the better part of the overseas flight reading the manual.
“I’d never really used it before,” she says.
About our contest
Each week our Neighbor section includes at least one entry in 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, email it in .jpg format with at least 300 dpi resolution to ssanders@dailyherald.com. Include your name, address and phone number.