Mepham High junior is picture perfect

Justin Plotnick was doing what any other 16-year-old would do. Last September, the Mepham junior was with his friends, skateboarding outside Mepham High School on a sunny afternoon. He had just bought a new fisheye lens for his camera earlier that day and was testing it out.

That’s when his friend, Richie Dominguez, also a Mepham junior, converted a perfect tail slide with his skateboard on a nearby bench. Plotnick snapped the photo, but it wasn’t until after when he realized he had captured the moment perfectly.

Six months later, the photo was chosen as a finalist in a nationwide contest held by Photography Forum Magazine, a quarterly magazine that strives to highlight photos taken by emerging photographers. The photo will be published in the magazine’s spring issue. Though the publication is based in the states, it is distributed worldwide.

“It was more of a spur-of-the-moment type thing. We were all hanging out and my friends were skating,” said Plotnick, of Bellmore. “That photo just happened to get taken.”

Plotnick has been interested in photography since he was a child, but said he really started getting into it in the past year. His mother, Dawn, urged him to stick with it, he said. “I was always good at it. My family always pushed me to stick with drawing,” he said. “I got into photography and got pretty good at that too.”

“They just kept pushing me and pushing me to get better at it,” Plotnick added.

Though he takes all different types of photos, what he loves most is taking action shots, as well as photos of cars, skateboards and bicycles. His friends are all skateboarders, but Plotnick said he himself is a bike rider. “I’m more of a BMX kid,” he said.

Using a Nikon D7000, Plotnick takes hundreds of photos a week, but he said he never thought of entering a contest until his photography teacher, Kelly Schiulaz, encouraged him. “From the moment he started taking photography with me, I knew that he had this gift,” Schiulaz said. “He was just something special.”