Two Kodachromes

Two Kodak colour negatives

I have a friend who is unhappy about living in this century and tells me how lucky we (he includes me) to have lived most of our life in that 20^th century.

He may be right is some ways as many from my family and writers I worked with in that last century are all dead. But there is something to be said about stuff like Wikipedia or that my local Kitsilano Public Library will email to tell me that a book I ordered is available for pick up.

I sometimes harp on how lucky we were as photographers to have been pushed by pushy art directors to do stuff we did not want to do and that, invariably, they were right. They pushed us out of our everyday comfort zone.

Vancouver Magazine art director Rick Staehling, a serious movie fan, liked to use a concept he called cross-casting. As an example I was well known for my portraits so he sent me to cover a Socred convention in Whistler. I was out of my element. I had to try very hard. He was right.

Now in this century I have discovered the wonders of combining 20^th century technology with that of this century. I have a huge filing system of thousands of negatives and slides. I have come up with the idea of doing what I called scanner (EpsonV700) negative sandwiches without mayonnaise.  I look for 2 (sometimes 3) negatives and put one on top of the other. Best results happen if the negatives (or slides) are from the same session. I scan them. And wonderful they are! They are a sort of mechanical version of Photoshop layers.

I believe, considering that I have scanned well over 3000 plants from my garden, that the scanner is the lost version this century of last century’s fax machine.

I get at least two requests per month from above board American and Canadian institutions willing to pay me very well if I can send them via WeTransfer a photograph that they want. I go to my files (if they are film) scan them and send them. I have two exterior hard drives for all the digital photographs I take. I make money really not doing much.

Yes, we live in a good century if you are a photographer, but an old one who remembers stuff from that ancient 20th..