Tuesday, August 10, 2010


The podiatrist has diagnosed my right foot with plantar fasciitis and unless I have some orthotics made for it I will soon be walking with a cane. My dentist has informed me that unless I have a crown made for a back molar I will need a root canal and or lose the tooth. The health plan I am saddled with will pay for neither. Ultimately I must choose if I will look good in a cane as long as I keep my mouth shut.

The pain in my pinkies is excruciating and not only does my left elbow hurt most of the time (I broke it a couple of years ago) so does my right elbow. I feel that I am living in some sort of accelerated time very much like Bowman in 2001: a space odyssey looking at himself and seeing a 100 year-old man.

But there are some good things to report. I am back from a holiday in which I worked for a magazine for a week. The magazine editor, the art director, the writer and the photographer were all me. I did not get a cent for it because as the publisher I could not pay myself for all the work done. The coffers are empty. Working for a magazine (even if this blog/magazine is my own) was an uplifting experience. It was thrilling to write and somehow have the pictures to illustrate what I was writing or conversely, it was fun to have pictures for which I could write something.



And tomorrow Wednesday sometime in the afternoon I will be taking pictures of an undraped Quilla with my iPhone (and just in case with my real film cameras). I am doing this for fun. Quilla has been one of the favourite models at Focal Point and every time she has entered the studio my students have been dumfounded. I have always felt frustrated that as the teacher I must watch my students take good photographs under my instruction. This frustration has led me to shoot some pictures with fast film in my Nikon FM-2s. I like my pictures but I feel hamstrung and frustrated. No more. Tomorrow I will have Quilla all to myself. I am going for the rumpled white sheet bed look. I am excited at the prospect of using my iPhone with a medium-sized soft box (it lowers the contrast and iPhones like that) and producing loose, off the cuff photographs as opposed to some of the staged portraits I may be known for.

Life, in spite of those pinkies isn’t all that bad.