2007 Reader's Photo Contest

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1st Place Winner: Karen Batal Minneola, Fl

What do you get when you mix a precarious 7-year-old, a pair of magnifying glasses, and a mom with a camera at the ready? Karen Batal's winning image in this year's humor category. Karen says of her willing model, daughter Jillian, "She's the queen of faces. It was all her idea. We took it right in our backyard. She's standing against the wall holding her hair up."

In fact, Jillian has always been Karen's muse. "Her birth sparked my interest in photography," she says. Since then, Karen has captured a variety of landscapes and portraits, specializing in images with a funny bone. "My eye is drawn to humorous moments," she says.

Nature

1st Place Winner: Jeff Rayner Los Angeles, CA

When Jeff Rayner's mother loaned him a small camera years ago for a school trip, little did either one of them know that little Jeff's first "terrible" pictures would begin his love of photography and one day lead him face-to-face with a hungry white Bengal tiger.

The English-born, Los Angeles-based freelance photographer shoots for several American and British papers, but this day took him to a zoo on assignment with an Australian newspaper. The tiger, Odin, has become quite a celebrity for his daily dips into the pool to chase food thrown in by his trainer. The zoo put up a plate of glass so the public could see the swim. "It was a bit of a nightmare to shoot with the sun reflection through the water and onto the glass," Jeff remembers. "Then it went behind a cloud and I got it." As Odin swims, he blocks his nose and ears, which causes his lips to raise in a ferocious smile. Jeff says, "The image's blue element, the bubbles, and the white tiger is almost dreamlike."

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