George Garrett - 16 December 2018

For anybody beginning to read here I suggest you persist as the information herein is useful.

When George Garrett died on March 14 I received many requests for my portrait. I could not figure out why the station he worked for or the Vancouver Sun did not have a good picture. I will explain below my answer.

 George Garrett - Captain of the Air

Today I was talking to my friend Joseph Planta (he of an extraordinary memory) who told me that George and he had visited me on December 16 2018. And then to my amazement he added that I had photographed George (one photograph) with his hands crossed across his chest, and, that minutes later, he had walked out of my office with a nicely printed photograph.

I had no memory of this. I looked all over my computer and it was nowhere. My conclusion is that I had downloaded the picture and printed and not save the file I used for printing anywhere. I started looking into the storage cards of my Fuji X-E3 close to that date.

Then disaster struck, my computer told me that my storage cards had to be reformatted. This action erases anything that would be in them. I ran to EJ Phone Repair on Broadway near my house. The two brothers smiled at me an informed me that the device that I used to download into my computer was old and broken and I would need a new one that would work more quickly. I had gone to EJ’s knowing that I would have to bring my computer for fixing. I thus lucked out.

I am not going to press my luck any further and tomorrow I will take about 50 storage cars (all of them) and they are going to save them to two exterior hard drives in chronological order.

All the above is most important for any photographer who has gotten this far. Now I will add the explanation on why so many wanted to get my George Garrett photograph.

It was at least 9 years ago that my daughter Alexandra began to put my negatives and slides into files with her neat writing indicating what was in it. With my poor printing I can state here that I have a wonderful filing system with photos I began to take in 1958.

All I had to do was to go to Garrett, George to pull out the photograph people wanted.

I believe that photographers have been chucking their negatives and slides. I have not. Because my Blogger blog (6050 of them) is a Google blog, my pictures can be found in Google without going to my blog.

Today I sent two scans (600dpi 8x10) to a firm in the US doing a documentary on computer pioneer Adam Osborne. Can it be possible that I am being paid good US Dollars because they could not find any pictures of him anywhere? And how many photographer have a high end flatbed scanner who was able to scan those 35mm Ektachromes to the standards asked? 

Adam Osborne

 

Again I got the job because they found the photos in Google and then they contacted me as my email is in my Webpage.

In the last few years I have sold my photographs of Jane Jacobs to the Rockefeller Foundation, a photograph of Martin Scorsese to the makers of a documentary (and they did want a very large file all made possible because of WeTransfer), a photograph of Robbie Robertson and quite a few more.

All, because those photographs are filed. As for my digital photographs, in a few days, all those storage cards will be of good use to me.

My next job is to take all my Galaxy5 and iPhone3G photographs to be stored in two exterior hard drives.

I believe that since my eventual oblivion is statistically close, my daughters will be able to keep making money from my good files.