I am 72 years old. Until the bottom fell in journalism and magazines I was a most prosperous and busy photographer with a very nice studio in downtown Vancouver. I am now retired (not exactly by choice) but I feel that I am taking some of the best photographs of my life. I shoot and shoot. For three years I have had a Fuji X-E1 which was and is my first digital camera. I find that shooting for fun, for oneself is nice indeed.

I have an efficient darkroom in the basement of my house where I process my b+w film and print them on my venerable Beseler enlarger with Dichroic color head (very good for dealing with variable contrast b+w papers).

This means that I can shoot with my 3 Nikon FM-2 cameras. My film of choice for many years was Kodak Plus-X but for the shot here I used Kodak Tr-X. I was teaching a class called the Contemporary Portrait Nude. My students were using mono-light equipped with a softbox. So as not to intrude I banged off some snaps exposed for the modeling lights of the flash unit.

Since then I have discovered that for optimum skin the film to use is Kodak T-Max 400 which I process in T-Max Developer. I no longer use Kodak HC-110 which I first started using when I was 20.

The colour of this picture is easy to do. I scan my b+w negative with my Epson Perfection V700 Photo. I scan it as an RGB negative. Once scanned I play with the yellow and the red to achieve something like what you see here.

Draped to kill