Sinéad snaps up first prize in competition

ENNIS pupil Sinéad O’Neill has snapped up a first prize in a nationwide photography competition. Sinéad was the senior cycle winner of the annual Science Snaps photographic competition, held in the run-up to science week. Bus Éireann are set to use the winning pictures in posters inside a selection of its coaches.
This year’s theme for the competition was ‘The Wonder of Small Science’. Sinead’s winning photograph was titled An Eye for Nano and depicted a memory card.
“I was thrilled when I found out I was one of the winners, I was so surprised,” Sinéad said.
The Leaving Certificate pupil comes from a family of avid photographers, with Sinéad first taking up the camera when she was just 12.
She explained the idea behind her award-winning photo. “I had a few ideas for the competition and my mother helped me narrow them down. I could only enter two photographs. I was thinking about small technology and the way technology has gone so small is just amazing. To think that something as small as a memory card can hold more than 500 pictures and some even more, is just crazy. The memory card is so small, it’s just amazing,” she said.
The competition is run by the Tyndall National Institute, Cork, and supported by Discover Science and Engineering. It is open to junior and senior cycle secondary school pupils as well as the general public.
The winning entries and a shortlist of finalists in Dublin and Cork feature at exhibitions this week at Dublin City Library and Archive, Pearse Street, Dublin 2, and at the Discovery Exhibition in Cork City Hall.