For a long while I find myself beginning my blogs with – At my advanced age of 81…

I cannot seem to stop as my age is a constant in my mind.

I have written, if I include this one, 5995 blogs since 2006. It is ancillary to my web-page. I began both in January of 2006. Because my blog is a Google Blogger it works with a powerful search engine. If you put Simone Orlando, Alex Waterhouse-Hayward into Google you will get at least for blogs where I mention the former dancer from Ballet BC who is now the Artistic Director of Ballet Kelowna.

Such is the presence of my blog that I get at least one email a week asking about a photograph that I have taken and offering me good money to get permission to use it. The latest is that I am being paid $300 American for a portrait I took of Norval Morriseau. The photograph will appear in the February issue of the Smithsonian Magazine.

Norval Morriseau

Today I was asked by Ballet Kelowna for a photograph of Simone Orlando with Jocelyn Morlock. I answered back that the photo they had seen in a blog with five persons is the only one I have. I thought about it and scanned two individual photos and brought them together with Photoshop. But it will be obvious that the photograph is not of them together in fact. I like to be honest about these things.

As I went into Simone Orlando’s file in my oficina I was pleasantly surprised by a portrait of Orlando with my granddaughter Rebecca and her lovely Can Cun purchased sailor dress.

The other supply was a snip from a contact sheet that even in the darkness of my metal files has gone through a deterioration that I find striking. I took the photographs of Orlando around 2008 and at that time I was using Ilford Multigrade paper that processed quickly and ended in a nice shine. But, and this is important, it was not archival.

Two surprises. And this old man at 81 is not quite yet obsolete, redundant, retired and inconsequential.