Rosemary Elizabeth Healey Waterhouse-Hayward - Mexico City - 1969

Werner Herzog - March 1996 - Vancouver

Because I have joined the 21st century, besides shooting with film cameras, I press the shutter on my two Fujis, an X-E1 and an X-E3. I am often asked what the difference is between film and digital. I like to answer with one word – uncertainty.

For photographs taken with film, before the film is developed, we use that lovely word latent. The undeveloped picture is there latently until it is brought out by processing.

In that last century, before we had that little screen behind our cameras that we could look at immediately (and our sitter would ask to see it), we had Polaroids. My Mamiya RB-67 had a Polaroid back. I often shot a Polaroid before the “real” thing. Many times my subjects were difficult and infamous. When that was the case I did not take my Polaroid back so they could not ask me to see what I was doing.

The Next Big Portrait - Bill Vander Zalm 

Luckily I am no longer a magazine, newspaper or annual report photographer so I need not worry of the conundrum of showing whoever might now pose for me what my photos look like.

There is another kind of uncertainty that I am enjoying in this century. I have been placing one negative (or slide) on top of another similar one on my scanner. I call these scanner negative sandwiches. When I do these there is that lovely momentary uncertainty on what the scan will look like.

Here you have two. One sandwich is of my wife Rosemary and the other of expert–on-everything Werner Herzog.

I like to tell my friends that I was born on August 31^st, 1942 and that Herzog was born on the next day. I also enjoy telling them that Keith Richards was born 18 December 1943. I like those two certain facts. And there is one more. In my files, Herzog's is right next to the one of Audrey Hepburn.