Local boy nabs award for his photo

Quinten King has been taking photos ever since he was strong enough to lift a camera. No matter where the camera was, the soft-spoken child with short cropped red hair and sharp-framed glasses was going to find it.

After that it was merely a balancing act of hoisting the contraption up to one eye and seeing what everyone else was missing.

“He would always be grabbing for it,” said Karen King, Quinten’s mother. “He’s been taking pictures since before kindergarten.”

Now a 12-year-old seventh grader at Berg Middle School in Newton, Quinten’s fixation as a toddler turned childhood hobby has garnered him some national acclaim after a photo he took in the summer of 2008, titled “Brother Eclipse,” was included in the PTA Reflections Program Exhibition, themed “Wow,” which is currently being displayed at the U.S. Department of Education in Washington D.C.

The photo features Quinten’s younger brother Jaden, 7, striking a Christ-like pose in front of a setting July sun as hot air balloons take flight around his head and arms in the background. A family trip to the annual National Balloon Classic in Indianola set the scene, but, Quinten said, the photo was more spontaneous than staged.

Or as Jaden put it: “The sun was in my eyes, and I was turning and my brother was like, ‘Stay there!’”

“It was pretty cool how it turned out,” Quinten said. “You can’t see the sun, you can’t see my brother, but you can see the silhouette.”

Submitting the photo in the PTA contest, which begins at the local level, “Brother Eclipse” — which will soon be featured on Visa credit cards — won regionals, advanced to take the state contest and then was selected for the Middle/Junior Division Awards of Excellence at Nationals for 2008-2009. An awards banquet to honor the winners was held Jan. 15 at the Dept. of Education.

Quinten is modest about the accomplishment, saying he “never really thought it would go that far.” But this isn’t the first time he’s been honored by the PTA Reflections program. In kindergarten, a photo Quinten took of a local firefighter received honorable mention.