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Wednesday, April 23, 2014

A Blurred Failure?





 
Valerie Easton, Jackie Coleman, Viktoria Langton, circa late 70s at the CBC


A local dance magazine has requested a photograph I took sometime in the late 70s of a CBC variety show that featured Jeff Hyslop as the male dancer. Looking for the requested picture I found that my extensive CBC files did not harbour said image. I got depressed at the thought of losing the money the dance magazine was offering. Then I thought a bit and went down to my files and found to big three-ring binders that had the label, CBC b+w and CBC colour. It was in the second that I found the picture. I could fill a large hockey arena with pictures I took at the CBC. Perhaps when I am dead someone will offer my widow money for what represents a moment in time when the CBC was important to all of us and our government was able to support its needs.

Within that colour binder I found a these three 120, medium format, strips of colour negative shot on Kodak Vericolor II Professional. I must have been insane to attempt to freeze motion in the 3200 degree Kelvin movie lighting with 160 ISO film. I have no idea if I had the film push processed to 300 ISO. It would seem that my experiment of crouching on the floor with my extremely heavy Mamiya RB-67 and its 65mm wide angle lens was a failure. I filed away the pictures and I had forgotten them as I have many others.

But a good scanner can reveal that there is good stuff here. The dancers from left to right are Valerie Easton, Jackie Coleman and Viktoria Langton I had been primed by dancer Jim Hibbard to always shoot dancers from the floor to make them look taller. I sort of like the blurs.