Two BYU students recently represented BYU in Microsoft’s Imagine Cup in Cairo, where they were among the six teams in the final round of the photography competition.

Out of 300,000 students, 444 were selected to compete in 10 categories in the final round, according to the Imagine Cup fact sheet. Categories included software design, IT development, short film and photography.

Tara Fullmer and Rachel Asplund competed in the latter, where they were tasked to take pictures with the theme, Kaleidoscope of Cairo: Ancient Culture Facing Modern Technology. 

“They gave us a fixer, somebody who knew Arabic and English and knew Cairo pretty well, a security guard and a driver for the car,” Fullmer said. “For the following 36 hours we were able to take off and go all over the city and tell our fixer where we wanted to go and take pictures.”
Fullmer was not looking for typical pictures of Cairo.

“We didn’t want any pictures of the pyramids,” Fullmer said. “We didn’t want any pictures of the things that have been taken a million times. … We just wanted to take pictures of real-life Cairo.”

Many of their pictures included people in traditional Muslim attire on cell phones or waiting for the bus and pictures of modern-day Cairo juxtaposed with ancient Cairo.

“It was crazy,” Fullmer said of her experience. “So many people, no traffic lights, all the cars were dented because the traffic was crazy, people constantly walking through the streets, moms with babies just running across the street because that’s just how it is — no crosswalks, no street lights. It was just constant people — movement.”

Fullmer, a technology and engineering education major, found out about the competition through her professor, Geoffrey Wright, who teaches about multimedia. Wright said the department had just begun to push photography, which had never been done before.

The competition was a good fit.

“I brought in 10 students and we started brainstorming ideas for what we could do for this competition, not knowing if it was a big competition or not,” Wright said. “For me it was more of an opportunity to get them working in groups and outside of class.”

Fullmer and Asplund went through two rounds before being selected for the finals.

“They were only taking six teams to Egypt,” Wright said. “Theirs was the only American team to make it. We were the only school from the United States represented in photography.”

Austria, Croatia, India, Japan and Singapore also had competing teams in the photography competition.

Although Fullmer and Asplund did not place, Wright plans on entering teams next year.

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