Sunday, November 13, 2011



I feel I must continue with yesterday's nautical theme, since as I was while filing stuff I found an envelope with the title: Ale + Hilary – Bowen Island and Ferry. There are many nice photographs in this bunch. There was no date but since we knew we had gone to Bowen Island to attend the wedding of Clemen, our former Mexican housekeeper, we knew the date to be April 1983. Now that I have that date I can go to the 1983 family file where I know I have the colour negatives and slides to match this envelope of all b+w (35mm) pictures.

In 1983 I was still keen on using Kodak Technical Pan Film in 35mm (they had still not come out with the 120 version for my Mamiya). In those days I was still not using Nikons but a Pentax Spotmatic F with threaded lenses and Pentax MX with a bayonet mount. I liked to bring a small Sunpack flash that fit on the hot shoe over the Pentax Mx. That combination was the one I used to shoot rock bands and rock band concerts for Les Wiseman’s In One Ear column in Vancouver Magazine.



The sequence you see here of my daughter Alexandra who was 14 is with that remarkable Tech Pan film with its extended red sensitivity which is so startling in its reproduction of skin. Because Tech Pan was slow film (ISO 25) I would be pretty sure of my exposure here. I would have been 1/60 at f-11 and my Sunpak would have been set for the same f-1. The Sunpak was not too accurate so I believe that its automatic eye might have given a touch more light. In those days I was hampered (its explanation is a bit beyond the purpose of this blog) by my Pentax’s cloth focal plane shutter which could synchronize (at its fastest) with flash at 1/60 of a second. The Nikons I was going to one day get would synchronize at 1/125 and eventually at 1/250 second. That gave a photographer more control when mixing flash with daylight on a sunny day. What saved me here was the slowness of Tech Pan. Using the sunny 16 rule which stipulates that the correct exposure on a sunny day is f-16 with a shutter that is the reciprocal of the ISO it meant that my initial exposure to consider was f-16 at 1/25. To alleviate the power of my Sunpak and to cut the camera shake and movement of the ferry f-11 at 160 was a better combination.

"Whatever," as my youngest granddaughter Lauren would say, the combination produced this startling sequence which serves to remind me that as long as I don’t look at myself in the mirror, that  I can safely say that in my family I have always been surrounded by great beauty.

An in spite of whatever we might criticize our BC Ferries for, and specifically that a Sunshine Breakfast will make any day a cloudy one, I must point out that a ferry boat and wind in the hair is a dynamite combination.

The other colour pictures of Rebecca,  on one of the Spirit vessels to Victoria, I have placed here as proof for the pudding (If you have tried the excellent rice pudding served in the BC Ferry’s buffet lounge you will know what I mean!). I took them with my iPhone 3G so they have their limitations but I still think they are beautiful.

Romance on the BC Ferries
The Bishop and Rice Pudding