This is a portrait of my dad. I'm posting it in honor of his birthday this weekend. I actually took this picture on film back in 1998, for a Basic Photography class at the University of Utah. My work in the class wasn't all that distinguished, and it certainly didn't leave me with any hint of the passion I picked up for the field years later, but I still find my portfolio from the course interesting. In particular, I find the shot of my dad fascinating A) because it shows the early use of that cockeyed thing I like to do, and B) because I can't remember how I convinced him to put on his lab coat and wave our hedge trimmer around while I took pictures of him.
Here are a few more shots from that class. I'm tempted to present them as a way of saying "look how far I've come," but I'm not sure that's what they would say. To tell the truth, I'm really not sure what these say.
Mikey Go Splat
This shot was actually taken as part of a three-part series. The assignment was to use three sequential photographs to tell a brief story. The first picture was of my buddy Mike, calmly sitting in a lawn chair on my roof, perusing my class text. The next one showed him falling backwards out of the chair. The shot above finished the epic tale, showing the aftermath of Mike's fall from the vantage point of my rooftop. That's my dog Otto sniffing at the corpse.
I'm really not sure what the assignment was for this one. It may have had something to do with the use of shadows, in which case I'm guessing I probably missed what my professor was going for. Kind of an interesting shot, though.
The Saga of Patsy is a long one, certainly worthy of some sort of Hollywood treatment. He* started out as a faceless stuffed human dummy my buddy Mike (same guy as the one in the shot earlier) used to dress up in Viking gear and take to our high school football games. Then after Mike and I became friends, he built a new and improved Patsy to use as a general stunt double, something we could strap to the roof of our car and drive over with my Honda and so forth. Mike even made a nice paper mache head for him. Eventually Patsy met his demise up at Mike's family lot in Morgan, where he either set him on fire or blew him up with illegal fireworks or both. The details are a little hazy. At any rate, somewhere between the second incarnation and the firework show, I dragged Patsy into my backyard and posed him for picture that would demonstrate depth of field.
(For anyone interested, the figures in the background are a life size cardboard stand-up of Boba Fett and a life-size cardboard stand-up of Slash--with Teddy Roosevelt's face pasted on top of it. Oh, and Patsy is wearing an old bagger shirt from Dick's Market in Centerville.)
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*Patsy, while gender-neutral in an anatomical sense, was always considered a male in spite of his ambiguous name. He was named after the sidekick Patsy from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" who was responsible for banging the coconuts.
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