Last July, Jared Wickerham approached our editorial team with the idea of photographing the Pittsburgh Pirates with a Polaroid camera soon after he was hired as Pittsburgh City Paper's full-time staff photographer. It turned out to be an award-winning idea.

On Wed., May 29, he was awarded with two Golden Quill awards from the Press Club of Western Pennsylvania for his work: one for Craft Achievement – Photo Essay and the best-in-show Ed Romano Memorial Award: Photography, selected from all of this year's winners in photography categories.

A seasoned local sports photographer, Wickerham wanted a new way to capture the baseball games so many others have documented over the years. Every Sunday home game, the Pirates wore retro uniforms like the team wore in the 1970s. Wickerham decided to join them in that theme, armed with a vintage Polaroid SX-70 Model 1.

The players themselves were as excited to see the images as the rest of us. "Starling Marte, a guy who has undoubtedly been photographed a million times by hundreds of photographers, wanted to make sure he could get a copy of the Polaroid," wrote Wickerham in his intro to his essay.

You can see his award-winning photo essay here: Sunday Afternoons at PNC Park.

Another big winner from the evening was City Paper contributing writer Tereneh Idia, who took home the award for Excellence in Written Journalism, Daily – Columns/Blogs for her important columns on topics like race and adversity. Idia recently reached her first anniversary as the writer of City Paper's weekly Voices column, crediting popular Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Tony Norman as the one for first encouraging her to start a column.

Read one of Idia's columns that helped earn her the award here: Who Gets to Be the (S)hero?

This was the first year that City Paper competed in the daily category against larger publications like Post-Gazette and Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. In previous years, CP competed in the non-daily category but was bumped up for producing original content at least five days a week.

City Paper also had three Golden Quill finalists:

• News writer Ryan Deto in Excellence in Written Journalism, Daily – Business/Technology/Consumer for his story: Is the Pittsburgh Airport Building up a Flight Bubble?

• Music writer Jordan Snowden in Excellence in Written Journalism, Daily – Arts/Entertainment for her story: What Was It About Mac Miller That Connected With Pittsburghers?

• And, contributing writer Jessie Sage in Excellence in Written Journalism, Daily – Columns/Blogs for her column: Peepshow, a sex and social-justice column

For a full list of the winners and nominees, visit westernpapressclub.org.