I took a programming class in college and have had this inside joke url ever since
I turned 29 on Friday. “Ooooh!” my friend Macon said, “so that means you’re in your Saturn return!”
“That is not a thing,” I replied. “I mean, I am going through all of that for entirely Earth-based reasons. Hey, we planning a trip to Vietnam or what?”
(Larger.)
“Is there any way we could make this shoot useful to you?” I asked Joanna, another one of my super helpful friends willing to play guinea pig.
“I guess it’d be useful if I came away with a headshot? That could be cool.”
“Sure! Let’s try it.”
“Uh hey, what’s this weird cow sculpture thing?”
“Oh, that? Yeah. Just — dude! I just successfully unplugged a light! And neither of us is dead! . . . Right?”
More photos: here.
A couple of months ago, my friend Kristen found out that a new organization was acquiring the women’s health center where she so passionately worked. A lot of questions, sadness, and tumultuousness crept into the following weeks for many of the employees at Midwest: a tight-knit group who until then had joked with one another over their IUDs and braved the daily protestor, were suddenly required to keep things they’d learned about each other’s futures confidential.
On Monday, the new organization took over, and Kristen lost her job. As they carried their things out, new workers carried boxes in.
More photos: here.
Last week my dad emailed me a heads-up: he was going to set up a seamless backdrop and a couple of studio lights in a spare room at my stepmom’s office for a few days, did I want to experiment with using that? I immediately emailed pretty much all of my friends in Minneapolis.
Are you free? I have no idea what I’m doing! Can I use your face?
Surprisingly, I got a few takers.
Sarah and Adam were awesome in so many ways. First of all, they didn’t make any snide remarks about the fact that I am actually afraid of the lights (dude that electricity is intense) and at one point heaved a light behind the backdrop rather than unplug it. Second of all, they came with all kinds of ideas about costumes and alternate personalities they could take on during the shoot, which is just ridiculously fun and also kind of what I’m all about. Third, they are attractive people and difficult to make look bad.
“I brought an umbrella as a fun challenge for you!” Sarah announced. “Also can we do a Freaks and Geeks style yearbook photo?” (This may become a series: more on that by the end of the week.)
Full album: here.
Below: Sarah as rich and surly teenager, Adam as trustworthy businessman.
I very nearly threw all of those envelopes of negatives directly into the trash.
They’d been crammed together like trash, separated from their prints and randomly crumpled in one bulging envelope. Resented as future trash, just another thing to keep track of until then. Even when I was using film, (ha what? I used film once?) I had never understood why the drug store gave me these damn things with my prints. Negatives! For what — pictures I’d taken as some goofball kid in high school, 4x6s I’d already carefully pasted into collages and scrapbooks?
That’s exactly what those photos were good for, I thought. Negatives are for Real Photographers. Negatives are for the diehards of technology, the chemists, the artists, the luddite sages.
But then I held one dented, tiger’s eye strip up to the light.
What! I’d forgotten about this one. And what’s this? I must have given that print away. Hey, I realized, I want another chance with these.
I got my first digital camera (1.3 megapixel, cutting edge!) second semester of my Freshman year in college, and it was around then I started getting interested in photography as a thing I wanted to get better at: being able to see the result immediately was huge in figuring out what worked, and instant gratification has a way of becoming addictive. Since then I’ve gone through a few desk top computers, a few external hard drives. In the processes a lot of those early digital photos were lost. Data got corrupted, I didn’t transfer something correctly: for the majority of them, I honestly don’t know what happened to them. Even when present those photos were always intangible, disappearing with the click of a power switch.
But these negatives, randomly jammed together with no indication of date or location, managed to survive those haphazard, careless years. Instead of throwing them in the trash, I could just put them all in a ziplock bag and mail them to a scanning service. Why not right?
And so, ladies and gentlemen, through the miracle of past technology meeting present, I give to you the fine results of my first photoshoot. (I’d like to say I took this around age eight, but I think it may have been more like thirteen.)
Full album of random life experiences, age 16-19: here.
