Black & White
Friday, June 17, 2016
Since I returned at the end of April from my trip to Buenos
Aires I went through a few commitments I could not avoid. One of them was an
appointment to have my enlarged prostate reamed (I like that word!). Then there
were family obligations like taking care of my Rosemary who has a very bad left
knee and dealing with my youngest daughter who is getting ready to move this
Saturday the 19th to the little home they purchased in Burnaby, BC. I purchased
a Canon Pro-1 printer and I am learning the ropes. It is a big change from my
now gone darkroom.
All the above have prevented me from writing more blogs
about my trip to Argentina and I have to confess that I had a very large hole
to fill since I did not write any while I was in Buenos Aires. Because of
that gap I decided to write a few filler blogs (many with racy photographs)
which were relatively easy to write. I am now ahead of myself but I could not
resist in writing one more. So here it is.
For most of my photographic career I have studied a situation
and then commited to doing it one way. The only variant might be to shoot the pictures in horizontal
and vertical modes. This I have always done as it is one of the prerequisites of
the magazine photographer to give the magazine art director photographs that
will fill pages without unnecessary cropping.
In only a few (very few) instances has an art director said
those terrible words after seeing pictures I have submitted for an assignment.
These are: “Alex, we are going to have to re-shoot this.”
Here is an example of a self-re-shoot. Salem was happy to pose for me in my Mexican Puerto de Liverpool suit and smoke an H. Upmann cigar. But I did not like the look of white underwear so I asked her to pose again (on another day). Since I had to buy two cigars it was expensive.
The contacts to both sessions