Behind 1st prize photos

Michael Miller

Fernando Mallory has entered the Orange County Fair’s photography

competition for the last four years, but awards don’t mean everything

to him.

“It’s not easy to get into the fair,” Mallory said. “Just to be on

the wall is a feat. There is no bad photography here.”

This year Mallory had no need to console himself. The 49-year-old

Tustin resident, who graduated from Orange Coast College in 2004, won

two first-place awards in this summer’s amateur landscape photography

contest. His color image, “Wild Yellow Poppies,” and his

black-and-white, “Venus,” finished first in their respective

categories.

The two photos, along with their first-place ribbons, are on

display in the fair’s Visual Arts Building.

Every year, the fair’s Visual Arts Program invites photographers

to submit pictures for competition. Mallory’s two entries were among

some 1,900 the fair received in May. In the end, the fair’s jury

selected about 60% of the entries for display.

In June, a panel of three judges examined photos in eight

categories -- landscape, people, seascape, architecture, plants,

animals, children and families, and miscellaneous -- to select

winners in color and black and white. The judges chose the winners,

which are also separated into amateur and professional categories,

unanimously.

When fair officials called Mallory with the good news, it was a

particularly triumphant moment for a man who once thought he would

never finish college.

Mallory, who dropped out of Long Beach City College in the early

1970s, enrolled at Orange Coast College two years ago after three

decades in the restaurant and motel industries. He was inspired to

return to his studies after attending the funeral of a friend, who

died at age 67 right after finishing law school.

“I could see he hadn’t gone back to college to get a job,” Mallory

recalled. “He had gone back so he could be serene with himself. It

brought me to reflection about my own background and ignited a

burning desire to be a college grad.”

With most of his Long Beach City credits still valid, Mallory

graduated from Orange Coast College in 2004 and moved on to Cal State

Fullerton, where he has been named a McNair Scholar and majors in

clinical social work. Before leaving Orange Coast, however, he

decided to hone one of his hobbies by taking a basic photography

course.

Although the class was only one semester, Mallory made an

impression on his instructor, Chauncey Bayes.

“Just right off from the first, he had his hand in the air asking

questions,” Bayes said. “He was the kind of student who worked hard

and went beyond what the basic needs were.”

Mallory had some experience with a camera before taking Bayes’

class -- he worked as a pop music photographer in the 1980s -- but

the course improved his artistic eye. His two photos currently on

display at the Visual Arts Building resulted from dozens of shots as

Mallory searched for just the right angle and lighting.

In both works, Mallory looked for symmetry. The desert landscape

of “Wild Yellow Poppies” shows two rows of clouds moving in different

directions, as well as a pair of descending mountain ranges that

point to the center of the shot. The picture of “Venus” shows a

statue encircled by a shrine and a stone pathway, with a pair of dark

trees flanking them on each side.

The use of black and white, Mallory believes, gives the second

picture a timeless quality.

“Most people would not think this was a part of metropolitan Los

Angeles,” he said. “They would think it was somewhere in Italy. The

black and white makes it look like a statue that’s been around for

hundreds of years.”