Sun photographer places in contest with Comdex shot

Friday, June 30, 2000 | 11:22 a.m.

Sun photographer Sam Morris won a third place award for feature photography in the 1999 Best of the West, a regional journalism contest run by First Amendment Funding Inc.

Morris' photo of two Cisco employees resting after a long day at the Comdex '99 trade show stood out among the 161 entries. The photo shows a male worker lying on the floor in the background while a female worker rubs her feet in the foreground.

"In this image," the judges wrote, "the photographer found a unique and clever way to look at a dull, ordinary situation. We have all been faced with similarly mundane assignments, and it is difficult to pull off such a coup.

"The angle of view, the prominence of the shoes in the foreground, the use of the feet of one person and the head of another all contributed to a playful, humorous and stylish image."

The winner of the category, Dan DeLong of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, shot a photo of a veiled Iraqi woman kissing the door of the Golden Mosque in Baghdad as a show of respect as others walk through a passageway behind her. Under Muslim custom, women and children cannot enter mosques.

The 1999 contest drew a total of 2,200 entries from newspapers and television stations throughout the West.