Billy Duffy - A Minnow
Saturday, January 25, 2014
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| Billy Duffy - The Cult |
Most people might be aware that Robert Capa’s
(Magnum Photographer) photographs of the allied landing on D-Day are his most
famous in his long and storied career. Few might know that these images are striking
particularly since the lab that processed the Capa’s negatives made some
mistakes in the processing.
Sometime in the mid 80s I came up with the
idea of writing a book which would have been called 1001 Photographic Mistakes
& How to Avoid Them. I shelved my project when I realized that I was
inventing new ones every week.
The fact is that many of the best known
images of the photographers of the 20th century came about because
of failures of equipment, processing or photographers not doing things
carefully. In fact there is uncorroborated story that tells that a frustrated Lois
Daguerre experimenting one day with his yet unperfected technique went home on
a cloudy day (not enough light for his low sensitive plates) and threw his
stuff into a closet in disgust. It seems that a mercury thermometer in the
closet broke and the rest, of course is history. The Daguerreotype became the
first successful photographic process and the mercury used to develop the
exposed plates caused a big increase of bald men.
Many Ray’s famous solarized prints began
with the turning of the lights in a darkroom when prints were in the developer
tray. The turning of the lights was a sheer accident.
Many other wonderful photographs happened when
photographer deliberately went against the grain of, “You cannot…”, or “Don’t…”
For most of my magazine and commercial photography
career I have attempted to avoid mistakes and equipment failure. Of the latter I
have spent a fortune having duplicate equipment, just in case. But in my invention
on finding new ways of making mistakes I have always followed the one basic rule
of magazine photography. This is that your picture (and only one is really needed)
must be useable and not necessarily. The big fish cannot get away in magazine photography.
It suffices to show up with one minnow.
I cut it very close (there is only one useable
image) when I had to photograph guitarist Billy Duffy of The Cult.
While processing the roll of 120 film in a
revolving tank I decided to take a leak. This I did so momentarily so left the
tank revolving on its electric base. When I returned I noticed with horror that
the tank had fallen off. This meant that the developer that swirled around the
negative did not swirl. You can see from the two scans of the negatives how the
lack of swirl produced a sine-wave-like separation and on one side the negative
is properly processed and in the other it is under developed. But you might
note that the exposure on bottom left of the first contact is fine. I passed
the test of the minnow and the Vancouver Magazine art director, Chris Dahl
never found out how close he was to not getting anything.
This time around as I scanned the one good
negative I have noticed fixer stains (caused by improper washing). I will re
fix this negative and wash it thoroughly, after all it is the minnow that I
caught and all those other big fish got away.
