Thursday, March 29, 2007




Bob Mercer's takeover as both editor and art director of Vancouver Lifestyles Magazine (until recently a magazine with no visible redeeming qualities) has given me the opportunity to explore areas of photography that I discovered with the introduction of an Epson 1640 SU flatbed scanner into my photographic equation about 4 years ago. The scanner has enabled me to work on what I call a hybrid photographic system. I can merge some of the features of film with computer manipulation. But many of my solutions and discoveries, while they could possibly be executed with an all digital sytem including a digital camera, are due to still thinking of the capabilities of film. With the proliferation of digital cameras and the mentality that all you need is the camera in your hand (no need to connect either by wire or by radio a good lighting system!) to make (capture is the going word) a good image, uniformity is the apparent rule. For me the results all seem to look like most, if not all, the photographs posted on Flickr.

The scanner has made me realize that at age 64 I am shooting what I think are some of my best photographs but also I have the idea that better ones are still to come.

In the lastest issue of VLM I have a photograph of young Vancouver jazz pianist Amanda Tosoff. Last week, on Wednesday at 8, I wanted to listen to her with her trio at her regular gig at the Libra Room on Commercial. I wanted to take my piano student granddaughter, Rebecca who was on spring break. Alas I was too sick to go so we will have to wait for another opportunity. I am particularly intrigued in that she plays some jazz standards by Horace Silver, a jazz pianist that both Rebecca and I like.

I took this photograph with a plain white background and I then scanned the b+w negative as a colour negative. By doing this I am able to tint the result with whatever colour I wish. I then placed the negative on my flatbed scanner. On top of the negative I lay a sheet of white letter paper. I scanned it. The result was a negative that I reversed to make a positive. The positive showed the textures and deffects that the scanner read in the paper.


I then chose a suitable colour. The second version seen here is the one Mercer chose to run.