Crooked River, June 1993, fourth grade
110 color photograph
This photograph of the Crooked River was my first landscape photograph. I took this picture while on a school field trip where we learned about the fish in the river. I tried to plan it carefully to get the composition just right, and as a result it was one of my first photos to come out clear and in focus.
I got my first camera as a birthday present in the first grade in 1989, and this was my first photograph. I took this photo on my birthday of my bike in the backyard from the porch of my club house that my dad built earlier that year.
Many of my photographs from elementary school were scenes staged with scale models and plastic figures like these scenes from a battle I took in the fifth grade. My friends and I would make up stories, and the photographs would illustrate events in the narrative. These battle scenes are from a World War II fantasy where Germany invades the US. The top photo shows the American soldiers firing a cannon and the bottom photo shows a shot down German plane in flames. A year after taking these photos I attempted to make the same story into a stop motion animated movie. I filmed fifteen minutes of footage, the first half of the movie, but I wasn’t able to finish the second half because the script called for many aerial fights with airplanes (think Hughes’ Hell's Angels) and I didn’t know how to do the animation.
