Every year, at least twice, Curtis Daily, a virtuoso baroque bassist from Portland, stays with us in Kitsilano as he rehearses for an Early MusicVancouver concert. He is performing in Bach’s St. John Passion with the Pacific Baroque Orchestra this Friday at the Chan Centre.

Daily is a very good amateur photographer who is eager, always to learn stuff that I might have in my receding brain cells.

This week (on Tuesday) we had a session with J. Daily likes to pre-plan (conceive) his shots or themes. This time around he chose an artefact that is in our piano room. Its name is “Ancient Instrument-Origin Unknown”. It was made by my friend, Robert Studen, an incredible glass artist who was a wunderkind of Vancouver’s art scene in the late 80s and early 90s. With his family he moved to the Sunshine Coast and has all but disappeared from our city which is a pity. There is one very important work of his downtown of which I wrote about here.

Daily’s choice of the artefact in our piano room was a challenge which he decided to tackle with a 4x5 inch view camera and a wide angle lens to accommodate for the narrowness of the piano room. It was a tad difficult to light. 

J was a flexible subject with a quiet demeanour. She was a pleasure to work with.

My pre-conception was something down the line of “keep it simple”. The idea was that I was going to wrap her chest and bottom with a black ribbon Daily and I bought at Dressew. To my frustration this was not simple. The black gaffer tape did not stick to the ribbon so Rosemary had to give me some safety pins. The original idea of using ribbon came from here.

I had the intention of using a Pentax MX with Kodak b+w infrared film (reason why McMath is wearing a purple-based lipstick). But the MX’s flash connections were inoperative. I ended up shooting two Fuji Instant Film  FP-100C colour snaps and one with the sadly (sadly!) discontinued Fuji Instant B+W FP-3000B. I took about 7 exposures with my Mamiya in b&w and a few more with my FujiX-E1. My faves are the ones with the instant film.

The look of that circular glowing ring in the pictures is due to on-purpose mounting my camera crooked in a large ring flash.

My b+ws will have to wait for Daily to leave for Portland on Saturday and I will process the 120 roll then. And of course Daily will process his large sheet film in Portland.