“It’s kind of a funny story,” says Julie Prior-Miller about the origins of her Images of Edina award-winning photo. Prior-Miller is a communications specialist for Edina Public Schools and was taking pictures of a visit by children’s book author and illustrator Nancy Carlson to Normandale Elementary. Prior-Miller was especially interested in the event because Carlson had once visited her own elementary classroom.
Carlson read a story and drew pictures of the characters that students could then take home. Among the students was a little girl named Ishwaq, who could hardly contain herself and kept looking around to see if others were as excited as she was. Just as Ishwaq turned around, Prior-Miller snapped a picture using her Nikon D3200 with a 50MM lens. “I hope others can see the excitement that Ishwaq was feeling in that moment,” says Prior-Miller, who titled the photo Hope and Happiness after a school district education theme. The photo won in the Learning category for the 2015 Images of Edina photo contest.
