9 August 2025

Photography is full of mistakes that were so wonderful that if one remembered how they happened they could be repeated at will.

About 3 years ago I grossly underexposed a portrait of a lovely cello player. My flash cord failed but somehow my Fuji X-E3 digital camera sensed the continuous modelling light of my flash softbox. The downloaded image was a completely black rectangle. There was something there which I coaxed back with my 20 year old Photoshop 8. The digital noise resembles extremely fast film and the colours while odd I like. The EXIF data told me that the magical f-stop was the to me unknown f-7.1 and that the picture was taken at 1/30 second at 200 ISO.

Here is my selfie that I took today using a mirror. I am wearing a t-shirt brought by my daughters from Santa María Huatulco, Oaxaca that features the faces of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. The camera rests on an Arca Swiss monoball tripod head that cost my Rosemary around $600 many years ago. It is the finest and most useful Christmas gift I have ever received.