My favourite portrait of Vittorio Gassman was the one top right in the contact sheet. It was the first photograph

Around 1980, photographer and mountaineer Gary Regester was up on a mountain in his native Colorado. It was there that he saw a mountain tent. By then these tents did not have wooden poles, etc. They were held up by  fiberglass poles. It was at that moment that Register had one of those associations which I believe is one of the reasons we are humans. From “a what if?” he designed what we now know as photographers’ soft boxes. He called them Chimeras. Before Regester the idea of enclosing a flash inside a box to soften the shadows for portraits involved unwieldly boxes made of wood. These Chimeras could be quickly unmounted and stored in light carrying cases.

It was in the mid 80s that I went to New York City. I quickly went to Olden Cameras and asked for a Chimera. The man behind the counter did not understand. I told him to look it up in the Olden catalogue. That Chimera and a few bigger ones have served me well.

In the late 80s Gary Regester came to Vancouver and gave a lecture on equipment. He talked of a tripod head called an Arca Swiss. I was impressed. I mentioned it to my Rosemary who promptly gave it to me for Christmas. She spent over $600.

The Gary Regester Chimera and his recommended tripod head where involved in one my most favourite portraits.

I faced Italian actor Vittorio Gassman on January 6, 1991. I set up my medium format Mamiya RB-67 on the tripod and had two lights. One was a small Chimera and the other was a hair light. I focused my camera. It was then that Gassman told me he was going to think what he was going to do and closed his eyes. I immediately took the picture which was the first and the best of the 11I took.

There are some photographers that would state that a large camera on a tripod is a slow setup. I don’t believe I would have taken that photograph if I had had a 35mm camera in hand. The stationary setup enabled me to take that picture the second I saw it.

Yesterday I called Gary Regester to thank him for his inspiration and for teaching me something about associating two disparate objects (the mountain tent that led to his Chimera). He was gracious. I call this sort of thing that I have been doing a lot of recently “tying up loose ends" which is a very good American expression.