By Jill Heffner

"Can I get changed yet?" she asks.

"Not yet, let's try this again. Smile up a bit, give me a self-knowing look." Chris Dunker, a Logan photographer, says with the smooth sounds of Miles Davis playing in the background. .

After looking at the first group of 50 plus pictures on the computer, Dunker decides another sitting should get just the right image of the model posing on the stationary bicycle.

"Give me a look that tells me I am making a wise purchase," he says.

With a change of music, U2, she gets back on the bike and pretends to ride the exercise equipment, and this time she gets it, the self- knowing look.

Dunker gave his assistant, Johnny Lundahl, the chip from his digital Cannon D-60, so Johnny could load the pictures and see what Dunker saw. Dunker, Lundahl, and ICON's Senior Marketing Manager Jay Wright gather around the computer and wait for the images.

"Do you see, these are much better," Dunker says to Wright.

The model is changed and going home.

Wright said he called Dunker on a Wednesday to get this photo shoot. The equipment was being shipped to Italy on Monday and ICON needed the pictures of models on the equipment before shipping.

"We are fortunate to have a photographer like Chris in Cache Valley. He is an excellent resource," Wright said. "If I had to go to Salt Lake to do this I would be very grumpy."

Wright said Dunker does most of the imaging for ICON's packaging. He said Dunker knows what ICON is looking for and he makes it look easy.
All of the pictures are taken with a digital Cannon D-60. "With digital it's instant, I get the image right then," Dunker said. "Imagine if I had to wait to get the first sitting developed, it would be too late."

For Dunker digital photography is the way to go. It saves time and money.
The garage door opens, a truckload of treadmills and bikes are loaded into the studio.

The worn, yellow-brick warehouse rests on Logan's west side. The gravel and dirt parking lot meet the two oversized garage doors and an off center black metal door with the words "Dunker Imaging" in bold white letters.

In the front right corner is a lone stainless steel refrigerator, connected to the wall by an orange extension cord. In the back right corner is a 20 by 30 foot shooting cove, a space designed to take pictures, rises 14 feet toward the ceiling. The walls and floor of the cove are painted gray. "It's big enough to take pictures of cars," Dunker, said.

To the left is another garage door; inside are a truck and three motorcycles and stoop-style steps leading to the office. Shelves and filing cabinets line the walls of the office. Filling the shelves are memorabilia and miscellaneous vintage items and cameras, picked up at bid sales and thrift stores. A pencil box covered with stars and space shuttles and a monkey with symbols are among the items. Some of the items are boxed and ready to ship to a friend to sell on E-Bay. In a garbage can the two feet of a stuffed toy stick out from the food wrappers.

Who's that?

"Where's Waldo," Dunker said. "It is time for him to go."

The middle of the room adorns a long polished conference table with stacks of boxes and papers on one end. An Apple computer and a laptop set on top a smaller table. A quilted black dust covers rests on top of a large imaging printer.

The walls contain photographs.

"I like the design of this one, I like the lines," Dunker said in reference to one of a series of industrial photographs.

In the front of the black and white background of skyscrapers and empty landscape, one man motions with his left hand and says, "Cherish our industrial landscape." The observer's eye gently follows the hand motion preserved on the photographer's canvas.

The industrial background is a Dunker original. The two male images were scanned into his computer from old LDS priesthood films and used as the subjects for the series.

Dunker said as far back as he could remember he always had cameras as toys. His father was a serious amateur photographer and a filmmaker for the U.S. government.

"It has always been a part of who I am." Dunker said.

Dunker is a transplant to Utah. The six-foot-3-inch tall photographer grew up in California and earned his bachelors degree at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He moved to Logan a year later and earned a masters of fine arts from Utah State University in 1995 and taught photography on campus for about five years.

For Dunker creating images is a form of expression. The images he creates span from commercial photos to stock photos to fine arts photos. The commercial photos tend to ones commissioned by a company to create an image with a specific design and purpose.

The stock photos, pictures on file, are ones anyone can buy and use. The creation of these images is a response to something he is witnessing or of the environment, he is in. Apart from confirming existence, the photographs create a diary and an opportunity to relive a particular time.

The creation of commercial and stock art permits the creation of the fine art. It's cool seeing pictures on boxes, or opening an edition of Rolling Stone, but the images are just "tiny slivers of the visual information that a regular person would be bombarded by on a daily basis. This is just a passing glance," Dunker said.

The Aug. 8, 2002 Rolling Stone displayed a spread of Dunker's picture. The story is about local amusement favorite Stan Checketts. One of the pictures has Dunker and a friend in a roller coaster car. "I took that one with a remote," Dunker said.

For Dunker the commercial photography facilitates the art photography. The fine art photos are something a person might take more time to observe Dunker said. "They might take a minute or two and experience the photograph, to be moved by it; to where after they have left the image they are still affected by it."

Captured in an abandoned limekiln in Dell, Utah, an old stove sits, heavy with years of dust and cobwebs, alone. A shaft of dust filtered light beams down through a grate and give the stove enough life that if it wanted to, the stove would pick up its tired, forgotten shell and walk like the rusty tin man toward the future.

"It was like walking into an ancient tomb," Dunker said of walking into the abandoned mill. "The casting down made me go wow."

Dunker said he finds abandon buildings or hears about them from other people and will go shoot pictures. He has photo series, taken in the old Indian School in Brigham City, of different community rooms, all taken from the same angle. Setting the pictures side-by-side Dunker creates an artistic beauty out of square columns and white walls.

The fine arts photos are the ones Dunker said he likes to create the most. "They are made out of a genuine heartfelt response: for me it is light. I respond the most to light psychologically; it has the most emotional weight."

"Sometimes I take pictures because the light is just right and capture the beauty of that moment, and it's amazing, I can walk through Wal-Mart or Costco and see those images selling product," Dunker said.

So next time you see a picture on a box or in Rolling Stone, or a picture of an abandon building, you never know, it might just be a Dunker Image.

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