A love for photography and faces has earned Cabrillo High School junior Hope Harrington honors in the 2014 National Scholastics Arts and Writing Competition. The 17-year-old was named a California regional winner of three Gold Key Awards for her black-and-white photographs.“I’ve loved taking pictures my whole life,” she said, adding that when she was in elementary school she began “messing around” with a digital camera and entered her photos in a contest.It’s the second year she’s won awards in National Scholastics contest, which was founded in 1923 and is the nation’s longest-running, most prestigious educational initiative supporting student achievement in the visual and literary arts. Contest organizers received more than 1,900 art submissions in the California region for the 2014 competition.Hope’s winning photographs are titled: Soul Staring, Serenity, and The American Dream. All three are portraits.“I love portraits. I really like connecting with the subject via the image so whenever I take a portrait I always want to capture almost like my relationship with that person. (It) kind of embodies either our friendship or our connection or something like that. Especially, I think it can be kind of communicated through the eyes. I always try to capture the eyes.”She focuses her lens on both friends and those she doesn’t know. For instance, one of her winning shots of a stranger, a balloon artist in Santa Barbara, came after she noticed him looking up.“I just snapped the picture. He just was looking straight in to the camera. I just thought it just looked like he had something more to him.”Old-school photographers will be happy to hear she primarily shoots on film and develops it in a darkroom.She said she prefers film to digital photography where photos are manipulated by computer.“I like the way it looks,” she said. “I feel like I can work with my hands more in the darkroom than I can in Photoshop. It’s not really the same. It feels like a click of a button doesn’t really do as much as developing in the darkroom. You can infuse more creativity, I think, into the darkroom than you can with digital.”Her works now go on to be juried at the national level with Gold Key winners from across the country.Notable past award alumni of National Scholastics include Truman Capote, Philip Pearlstein, Andy Warhol and Stephen King who won when they were teens. In more recent years, famous names such as Zac Posen, Lena Dunham and Erik Madigan Heck have become alumni of the program.Hope, who attended Dunn High School for her freshmen and sophomore years plus Dunn Middle School and Los Berros Elementary School before that, is no stranger to National Scholastics Arts Competition. She won two Gold Keys and one Silver Key in 2013 for her photographs in the California region where more than 2,000 photograph submissions were received.Hope’s interest in film photography grew in sixth grade when she began her work in the dark room. She has also studied at Brooks Institute of Photography in its summer program for advanced high school photographers.In 2013, the daughter of Tim and Lucy Harrington of Mesa Oaks was invited by notable artist Max Grover to exhibit a collection of her photographs in the Max Grover Gallery in Port Townsend, Washington.After high school, Hope plans to attend college and major in public policy analysis or economics for an eventual career in business, government or nonprofit sectors.“I like this being a hobby,” she said of photography. “It kind of de-stresses me. It’s a way for me to release. It’s kind of outside of academics. I get to be a little bit more creative and I don’t want it to be something that I have to do. I want to do it because I want to.”