1977 - Mamiya RB-67 & 65mm lens

There are some advantages of bed rotting with my two cats. Today I had again scanned a bunch of red roses (because they were there). While in bed I wondered what excuse I could use the red roses scan to write some sort of blog. Then I remembered.

In my nightie I ran to my oficina and went into my 4 drawer filing cabinet (perhaps around 600 women in alphabetical order). I went straight to the “Model in Red”.

In 1977 I was trying to become a photographer in Vancouver. I told Rosemary, “I cannot compete with my Pentaxes with photographers who use Hasselblads. I cannot afford to buy one.” I thought hard and ordered a Mamiya RB67 from Adorama in New York City. For this 6x7 camera I bought a 65mm wide angle (equivalent to a 35mm in 35 mm cameras) because I could not afford to buy another lens.

I took the camera to sssssss and showed it to art director Rick Staehling.He told me that my camera looked like one on steroids. A month later he called me to tell me he had an assignment and wanted me to use the new camera.

We quickly found out that on the horizontal format (the Mamiya has a revolving film back) the photograph fit a two-page spread to perfection. On a vertical format the photograph fit a full-page bleed vertical page.

It seems that for a while all those photographers with expensive Hasselblads could not compete with my Mamiya.

This was  when we were living in Burnaby. I have no memory of the name of the model in red and how she found me.  The resulting photographs, six with the Mamiya and two rolls with my Asahi Pentax S-3 are  really the first ever photographs I ever took of a model. Obviously I had no idea of what I was doing.

It is nice to use here my new obsessive scanner negative sandwiches without  mayonnaise.

I wonder what might have happened to her. And I cannot believe that I have these photographs nicely filed. My 20-year-old Photoshop 8 handled correcting the colour shift with no problem.