16-year-old Hadie Beaman dominates state photo contest

Camp Verde High School sophomore Hadie Beaman said her first time taking photos on her own was for her photography class freshman year.

Less than two years later, the 16-year-old placed No. 1 in Arizona at the SkillsUSA competition on April 7, and is heading to the national competition in Georgia over the summer.

Beaman said the most unexpected thing in her two-year journey has been “just that I enjoyed it so much.”

She said she decided to take the class simply because the photography teacher, Jordan Harris, had been one of her middle school teachers.

“I told her I would take her class, and I didn’t know what else to take,” Beaman said. “And it turned out being one of my best decisions.”

She is known to check out the class camera over the weekend and go out, practice and get creative with it.

“She’s just always had that knack for being able to see the shot before it’s taken,” Harris said. “And she has been just such a joy, and really brought some life back into a program that had been dwindling for a long time.”

Photography Class

This was the last year for the school’s photography program. Beaman had five fellow students in the class with her. The class offered a lot of practicing for the competition, though, she said.

It’s a very project-based class; there are lessons and class materials on Google Classroom available to the students, but most of the time, they’re working on their next assignment.

“I really enjoy that we have freedom to be able to walk around and use our imagination,” Beaman said.

Part of the reason for the low enrollment and the class structure was because Harris — the only photography teacher — wasn’t in the classroom during class time.

“I’m also teaching an actual art class during that time in this room, so they’re not even in the same room with me,” she said. “So I post all their content online, and they take their cameras and they go out and do their shots, and they submit them to me online, and I grade them, and I touch base with them as they come in.”

Students ask questions and meet with Harris throughout the semester, but there were a few who dropped the class because she couldn’t be there.

“I was told that they were going to hire another photography teacher, at least post the job for next year, and they ended up hiring a woodshop teacher instead,” she said. “We haven’t had a wood shop in a really long time, but we have all the supplies in the room for it. So this wasn’t the year to get a photography teacher.”

Harris graduated CVHS about 18 years ago, and always wanted to be an art teacher. When the previous teacher retired, she put in for the job and found out she’d be teaching it this year about three days before classes started.

“It ends up being a lot like competition, honestly,” Harris said. “Where they kind of just are given an assignment that day on the computer, and then they have to troubleshoot and work through it.”

SkillsUSA

The state competition Beaman won had about 40 competitors. The top five in the eight regions in Arizona qualified for the state competition. She won the regional competition in Prescott on Jan. 28.

Her classmate, senior Kaydence Kunkel, ranked third.

The class needed to bring along full-sized iMac desktops, because the school didn’t have laptops.

When they got to the SkillsUSA, the students took a technical exam on their photography knowledge, set up a 15minute studio shoot inside the Phoenix Convention Center and wandered around Phoenix for an hour to find a cover photo and five article photos for a fictional magazine titled “Green.”

The field assignment was her favorite.

“Mostly because my focus is people,” she said. “I like taking candid pictures, even not so candid ones. But it’s just … being in a different environment.”

She also brought along several prints of photos she’d taken before the event.

“I’m not allowed to be a part of it,” Harris said. “I have to sit in the hallway and wait all day until she’s done. … With the exception of the field assignment, I get to walk around with her, because I’m not just going to send a kid out into downtown Phoenix.”

Future

Beaman said she’s found photography to be her new passion. She has other artistic hobbies as well, like reading, painting and baking, but none have come as naturally to her as photography.

Because of her love of photography, a travel photographer is her top choice of career, she said.

Either that or opening up a cafe, particularly marketed toward teenagers, here in Camp Verde.

“Going to downtown Flagstaff, you see those little coffee shops where people can sit and do their work,” she said. “ We don’t have some place like that here in Camp Verde, because we’re so small, and I know me, if we had a place like that, I’d be there all the time.”

She already has a digital portfolio, which is a requirement for the end of the class, and has shot photoshoots for people in her life in Camp Verde, including graduation photos for her sister.