CMR sophomore turns heads with eye for photography

C.M. Russell High sophomore Sarah Cherry remembers seeing the student body prepare for its tradition of tossing baby powder into the air before the start of a Rustler football game out of the corner of her eye.

She quickly snapped her camera up to her eye and captured the image.

“I saw it and thought that might be really neat, especially with the lights,” Cherry said.

She was pretty happy with the image even before leaving the game.

“I was taking photos for the yearbook,” the 16-year-old said. “And I thought it was cool enough that we might be able to use it.”

She was right. And then some.

The photo won the people category in the high school division of a Rocky Mountain School of Photography competition.

It was not Cherry’s first victory in a competition.

After starting photography as a hobby when she was 8 years old with a plastic film camera she found with her dad at a garage sale, she entered and won a $400 essay contest.

With it, she bought a Canon Rebel T3 camera and started to become serious about shooting.

“I’d been dreaming of getting a camera like that for a couple years by then,” she said.

She has since purchased a Canon 7D Mark II, which she used to take the image from the football game. She is taking a photo class at CMR, reading books and magazines, taking part in the Great Falls Camera Club and hoping to become a professional photographer.

When she grows up?

No.

“I hope to start a business for my photography within the next year or so. I am also determined to display my work at one of the shows during Western Art Week before I turn 18,” she wrote in an email.

Her end goal is to become an outdoor photography who sells her prints.

“Anything that has to do with photography, I’d love to be,” Cherry said.