Merry Christmas from Hutchinson, Kansas
-Pat
Monthly Archive for December, 2009
An interesting scene at the Luminaria festival in Hutchinson’s Hyde Park neighborhood tonight.
-Pat
Customers lined up to get into the new Boot Hill Casino and Resort in Dodge City, Kan., which opened for business on Tuesday afternoon, Dec. 15. Boot Hill the first state-run casino in the country.
We set out to shoot some falling starts during the meteor shower on Sunday night, but the clouds set in eventually and the only one we captured is in the second to last shot. We nonetheless had a good time with the lack of light and long exposures.
-Pat
Ramblin’ round the Kansas countryside.
Brad makes his inglorious return to Kansas. He’ll be here for about a week documenting salt miners and sleeping on my floor. More posts documenting our adventures are soon to come.
Cheers,
Pat
The Ratzlaff family will spend their first Christmas in their new Hutchinson home after moving out of the Caryville neighborhood. The family’s former house was one in a block of homes purchased by brine injection salt mining company, VigIndustries, in advance of potential sinkholde development.
I visited Retired National Guard Staff Sergeant SuzAnne Honeycutt and her daughter JourdAnn Diehl, 15, for a portrait session in their Hutchinson home last Tuesday. Honeycutt has suffered from post traumatic stress disorder since returning from service in Iraq. After setting up my studio lights in their living room I shot a few standard looking potraits of SuzAnne and JourdAnn smiling at the camera, etc. but after I got them talking they started to relax and play around with each other. I got a few of them each giving the other a friendly elbow jab, which was pretty funny to watch, but this shot was hands down my favorite picture from the portrait session. The expressions on their faces say so much about their relationship and it was a completely unexpected picture from my initial ideas about the shoot. I was very happy to see it printed at 5 columns on the front of today’s paper. Read SuzAnne’s story here.
The headline quote is from the last line of the article. Seems to me that a teenage daughter rolling her eyes at her mother is as normal as it gets.
Thanks for looking,
Pat
I shot the first annual Salt City Bowl today at Gowans Stadium in Hutchinson where Hutchinson Community College defeated the New Mexico Military Institute 22-14. Luckily I was one of two Hutch News photographers covering the game so I got some time play around and shoot a little differently than usual.
Cheers,
Pat
Roger Rice of Hutchinson overcame polio as a child and more recently has recovered from losing a leg in a motorcycle accident. With the help of friends, he rebuilt his motor tricycle, which won first place at this year’s rod run, Hutchinson’s annual hot rod festival. I photographed him getting ready to take a ride outside his Hutchinson home on Friday afternoon, November 6.