Out of more than twenty-seven thousand entries, this photograph of the Island Theatre on Circuit Avenue in Oak Bluffs won second place in National Geographic Traveler’s nineteenth annual photo contest. The photographer, Bob Gates, is a Syracuse University professor who rents a house (known as Rainbow House) near Zack’s Cliffs in Aquinnah for a week every summer.

Bob, a self-described semi-pro photographer – “like a semi-pro baseball player who plays for the love of the game but doesn’t get paid a lot” – says he’s photographed the historic theater before, but this time wanted to capture it at night. People have asked if it was staged, but he says it was just happenstance: “I stood outside for about an hour and took a few shots, one I really liked of a girl swinging around the lamppost, but then the ticket taker [Naomi Paulson] stepped out of the booth to smoke a cigarette and the guy with the reel came out. I had only a couple of seconds to get a shot.The first one I took was blurry because the guy was moving.”

The guy, it turns out, is “Buzz” Hall (Benjamin Lambert Hall Sr.), who owns and operates the Island Theatre and The Strand in Oak Bluffs and the Capawock Theatre in Vineyard Haven with his sons, Benjamin Jr. and Brian. Brian Hall says of the photo, “The composition, the way it’s balanced, it’s no wonder people would ask if it was staged. It’s like an Edward Hopper painting.”

Bob’s prize is a National Geographic photography workshop he’s taking in Santa Fe, New Mexico, this summer. (Check his website, www.pbase.com/bgates, for more Martha’s Vineyard photos, including one called Shark Rock that won him second place in “The Earth” category of Photo Life magazine’s international photo contest in 2006.)