Memory at my age is a tricky thing. Only recently did I remember that I had other photographs taken with my Hollywood scoop light besides the ones I had taken of Jo-Ann who is now a psychiatric nurse.

This is what I wrote:

I have this very large light that I call my Hollywood scoop light. It may have been used as such a thing many years ago. It has a huge light bulb that resembles an ordinary incandescent on steroids. When I turn it on it is very hot. It currently does not fit in my small Kitsilano studio so I store it up in the studio attic. Since it is balanced for film lighting it is rated at 3200 degrees Kelvin.

Even though I have owned it for at least 20 years I have only used it once. Illustrating this short blog is my former once-a-month Thursday girl Jo-Ann who is now a psychiatric nurse.

The light was given to me in the late 80s when studio photographer Brent Daniels moved to Toronto. This is his website.

I have now remembered that I photographed N in my studio. I very much like the results.

Antonucci’s hands are the hands of someone who works hard. They are not the delicate hands of what we would expect from a virgin’s hands. But I think that they represent a Virgin Mary, older, her Son dead, and who has lived a life that was not all a happy one. I think that Antonucci was perfect for this.


We celebrated by having a drink that has taken Argentina by storm in the last few years. As a boy when my parents and I would arrive at Retiro, the downtown train station I always looked for a large billboard near the Art Decco Kavanaugh Building. It said Fernet Branca. I had no idea what it was exactly but through the years I had been told it was an Italian form of bitters that was a good digestive.

The drink in question is to put lots of ice in a tall glass and fill about a third of it with Fernet. You pour Coke after. The drink in called Fernet con Coca.

It was last April during our trip to Buenos Aires that my nephew's grandson, Jorgito O'Reilly poured me a drink and told me. "Try this. I think you will like this."

The first sip was terrible. The second sip was passable and the third was heavenly.

We had the drinks partly because I like to do things in remembrance of people I know (dead or alive).

For anybody who might want to try this terrific drink, Fernet Branca is available ($27) at the Government Liquor Store on Cambie and 41st. And be forewarned it is 39% alcohol

In that long gone 20th century we photographers in Vancouver had to keep on our toes in various ways. If we worked for magazines it was important to visit the much larger pool of magazines in Toronto once a year. It was there where I showed my portfolio to art directors. The most important fact aside from having a good portfolio was to be able to convince the art director that I could produce on demand.

In my own city of Vancouver in that century it was paramount for a photographer to have a studio. Twice I shared it with another so as to be able to pay the rent. The most important feature in any studio in that time was the cove. This was a structure on one wall that was usually painted white and it curled from ceiling to floor so that properly lit, a person photographed would be standing with white behind from top to bottom and beyond.

A third factor was to test. Fashion photographers in particular tested. This involved dealing with new (and at the time is concerned beautiful and young females) models. In exchange for posing where the upcoming model would be able to add to her portfolio without having to pay the photographer, the photographer would try out (test) new films, new cameras and new lighting techniques.

Then with these results you went to see local art directors.

One of my first big jobs in the late 70s involved Vancouver Magazine Rick Staehling. I showed him my medium format (120 film) Mamiya RB-67. At the time photographers shot with 35mm cameras and the more wealthy ones with the medium format Hasselblad. The difference (not only in price) between the Sweedish/German Blad and my Mamiya is that the Mamiya instead of taking 6x6cm (very square!) photographs it gave me the option (by a nifty revolving film back) of taking vertical or horizontal 6x7cm photographs. Staehling asked me to shoot an assignment with that camera.

I never did look back and I must assert here that art directors everywhere like the fact that I shot vertical and horizontal and that this gave them the option of using my horizontals a two page spreads and the verticals as covers or full bleed (no borders) in inside articles. The 6x7 cm format was called the ideal format as it would fit magazine pages with next to no cropping (unlike those Hasselblad squares).

Another art director, Chris Dahl (and he did a lot of this) would transfer any one of my techniques into something not done before. I showed him portraits and nudes taken with Kodak b+w Infrared Film. He assigned me to shoot beautiful old homes in the Shaughnessy neighbourhood of Vancouver with that film. No architectural photographer would have ever done that. His interest in my infrared shots came from me showing him a portrait (with that film) of my two daughters.

Hilary & Ale

Infrared film

For a while in the late 80s I went nuts with Hollywood lighting and specifically the work of George Hurrell. To even begin I had to purchase a boom so I could do boom lighting (from up there) and a circular hard spotlight. This testing immediately led to me getting my first and last fashion job ever! For most of my magazine photography career I considered fashion the kiss of death for any local photographer. Magazines would get tired of their style and shift to the new kid in town.

Karen Campbell

It was my test shot of model Karen Campbell (above) where I used a boom light and projected clouds behing her using a focusing spotlight and metal gobos (in this case with a cloud pattern)  that got me a very big job on, of all things what my subjects did to keep thin!

Carla Temple

In the link below, Inspiration by Unexpected Error there are some photographs that came from my taking pictures of a Japanese/Canadian woman with her Shiatsu instructor. My camera was crooked within the confines of a ring flash. I did not know this and my Japanese/Canadian friend was much too polite to point it out. The resulting error led to one of my trademark shots in which I feature the side of the ring flash by, this time purposely having my camera crooked.

Anosh Irani

And so on with how photographic errors and testing lead to wonderful new stuff.

I find it sad to point out here that this last week's of photographs that are the result from testing with the kind Silvia Gallerano came about from someone who lives miles away in Rome. All this while I am unable to find anybody here, who lives here, to test with me!

The picture that adorns the beginning of this blog is the negative peel of the now discontinued (I have a few boxes left) Fuji FP-100c Instant Colour Film (100ISO) which I shoot with my Mamiya RB-67 with a Polaroid back. Once the peel is dry I put it face down (the black shows on the top) on a large dinner plate. I tape it with the virtually waterproof plastic lining used to line kitchen cabinets. I spray the black with a half and half mixture of bleach and rub with my fingers. Eventually the black disappears revealing a weird colour negative. I place it in water for a few minutes and then hang it to dry.

I place the negative peel on my scanner (it will scan negatives and slides besides prints). I tell my scanner that I am doing a positive. I scan and then with my 13 year-old Photoshop I reverse that negative to a positive. Then working with both Photoshop and Corel X2 I increase the contrast and tonal separation. It is just about impossible (at least for me) to ultimately correct the colour. But I like the results.

And thank you Silvia Gallerano for your inspiration and patience.

Inspiration by Unexpected Error 

No Attitude

Triscuits for Kate

My hero, Argentine poet and writer Jorge Luís Borges often wrote about his obsession with mirrors and of looking at himself in them. Once he became blind it was just a memory. Borges wrote:

A veces en las tardes una cara

nos mira desde el fondo de un espejo;

el arte debe ser como ese espejo

que nos revela nuestra propia cara.

My translation:

Sometimes in the afternoon a face

looks upon us from the depths of a mirror;

art must be like that mirror

that reveals our own face.

Such a face is the face of Italian actress (I am old-fashioned) Silvia Gallerano who is in town for performances of Cristian Cersoli’s La Merda at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre until May 13..

It is a face with liquid eyes that for me mimicked a Borges mirror. As she faced my cameras today in my little studio, watched over by Cristian Cersoli, her daughter Lara and tour manager Marco Pavanelli, I felt as naked as she is during her performances. Her only protection might be the microphone she holds tightly close to her face. She smiles with her eyes and I had to instruct her not to. I was not going to tell her that in La Merda that naughty protagonist, a naughty male dolphin, has a built-in smile like all dolphins do.

I may have taken no more that fifteen exposures when I stopped. We had coffee and sweets and the lingua franca was a combination of Italian, Spanish and English.

Of the show, La Merda, that I saw with my wife Rosemary last week I can state that it was a performance that is in strange opposition to having met the star and talked to the quiet writer Ceresoli. Ultimately this has to do with the fact that nobody who is not an actor (and I am not one) can ever understand how someone can spill their life out with a microphone and then days later, no matter how many times it sinks in, the face in front of my camera with a microphone, and the face of the woman with a microphone at the Cultch are not the same. 

I was captured by a face, by Silvia Gallerano and her liquid eyes.