“I like to have these kids see things that they don’t have an opportunity to see in the city,” Anthony DiMartino said in explaining the award-winning photograph on the front page of this issue of The Hudson Independent.

It was not until after DiMartino’s photo of the two young girls playing in Matthiessen Park was chosen as the winner of the “Summer Fun” photo contest submissions on this paper’s website that our staff learned the story behind the photos.

DiMartino, an Irvington resident, is a social worker clinical supervisor at the Bronx Lebanon Hospital. The two girls pictured, Geneesha Boone, 7, of Manhattan, and Dior Mieklejohn, 5, of Brooklyn, are just the latest of the children, DiMartino has provided “suburbia” experiences to over the last decade.

“Some of them are grown up now,” DiMartino said of the kids he has given the chance, as he put it, “to see deer, geese and chipmunks, the kinds of things they are not exposed to in their usual environment.”

He said that he favors parks in Westchester as locations for the children’s excursions after he picks them up in the city.

“I don’t have children,” DiMartino, 48, and single, said, “and this is something I enjoy doing.” He explained that he knew Geneesha’s grandmother and helped raise the child’s mother. “I take photos as a hobby, but this is the first time I’ve won a photo contest,” DiMartino said.

He will receive a $100 dinning certificate from The Hudson Independent as the winner of the photo contest.