Wilson High School digital media students have been collecting their fair share of awards recently,  and this month, Ben Tinsley and Emerald Green added to those honors in the CaliforniaStreaming Digital Photography Contest where Tinsley won a top prize and Green earned honorable mention.

The contest is organized by the California County Educational Technology Consortium, which provides digital media resources to enhance teaching and learning. It’s open to all TK-12 California students and teachers, and the judges chose the top six students and two teachers who created the best stories through pictures using critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity.

The 2023 contest theme was “innovation” and Tinsley won a top prize for his photo “Classroom” in which a student is floating above her desk under a spotlight. The senior said he changed his shooting location multiple times, and worked hard on the original image in Photoshop to create the supernatural effects.

“It shows the feeling of innovation and thinking in a classroom setting being conveyed through a visual metaphor of a girl floating,” Tinsley said in his official submission statement.

Tinsley received a digital action camera as a prize and had his photograph incorporated into a collectable CaliforniaStreaming poster.

Green’s work “Ready To Shoot” is a photo of a student posing with an old and new camera in the style of a vintage poster. She also changed locations from outside to inside the classroom where she was inspired by what she wore that day and the equipment they used in the classroom.

“This is a young woman of color breaking the stereotypes of women in the film industry as well as showing the breakthroughs of camera evolution,” Green said in her official submission statement.

Watch a Bruin Production podcast with Tinsley, Green and their teacher Thourn Heng that includes footage of the students working on their photos.