One Useable Image or the Kiss of Death
My mantra for being a successful magazine photographer, and I was from 1976 until recently here in Vancouver, is all about not harping about the fish that got away.
In that competitive (when it was) business that was editorial photography the kiss of death was not to return from an assignment with at least one useable image. It didn’t even have to be artistic.
The kiss of death was to have not loaded your camera correctly so the film did not advance and you took 45 exposures on a 36 exposure roll. Before the advent of scanners and Photoshop, an over-exposed slide was a patent example of photographic self-immolation.
The deal for achieving that one useable image was to make sure that there was two of everything. If your one camera failed, then what? If you could not check your exposure (slide film a necessary staple of magazine photography was not forgiving for exposure mistakes) because your meter died (a battery?) you made sure you had an extra battery and in my case an extra meter.
As I am now in a stage of abject obsolescence, redundancy and retirement I have lost that ability to work like a perfect little clock.
That was in evidence yesterday May 7 2017 when “the-you-cannot-get-your-eyes-off her face Silvia Gallerano in Vancouver performing Cristian Ceresoli’s one woman play La Merda at the Cultch”(East Vancouver Cultural Centre) came to our Kitsilano home for some fun (serious as they look) photographs.
I had my light turned on. My meter was working. My camera was connected to the Visatek mono light via a cable and a safe-synch. I took a photograph. It was completely off the spectrum when I checked (as one does when shooting digital).
I laughed and told Marco Pavanelli (the Tour Manager who is a young and well versed and intelligent man from Ferrara) that I had set my meter at 100 ISO but my Fuji X-E1 was set at 800. The photograph was over-exposed.
And yet…
