My understanding of S&M has been something that has eluded me since I discovered its existence.

A most prominent Vancouver poet once demonstrated how she improved her earnings by banging her black pump hard on a table of the Railway Club where we had our customary Thursday lunches. It seems that businessmen paid her good money for her to walk on their backs with said pumps. I could not imagine finding pleasure in being exposed to such excruciating pain.

My friend M, a lovely Italian, liked to play tough by wearing some of the trappings of S&M. But she might have been doing this at a time when punks ruled and had adopted some of them. 

Voluptuous as M was she could not hide a soft touch, a feminine touch, a sympathetic touch that made her such a good friend to chat with over coffee on Commercial Drive.

As a little boy (I have begun at least 100 blogs with that line) in Buenos Aires most of the people I knew had brown, dark brown or black hair.

The few that had blonde hair were either my English relatives or American girls at the American Grammar school I attended. I was besotted with Mary Lou Chase when I was in the fifth and sixth grade. She had very light blonde hair. I dreamed about her every night for a long time. The only other blonde of note was Evita. She had her hair pulled back into a bun very much like my mother’s hair. She came to our school to plant a tree. I could not get my eyes off her face and her blonde hair.

When we moved to Mexico City in 1954 rubias (blonde women) became güeras (with one special exception mentioned below). For many in Mexico in that time there was an expression (a most racist one) in that when one was about to get married the person was invariably asked if he or she were marrying a light-skinned person. The expression in question was, “para mejorar la raza,” or to better the race by lightening the skin of one’s subsequent children. I remember seeing many ads in Mexico City buses featuring skin lightening creams. TV beer ads of the makers of Corona featured American blondes (with obvious American accents when they spoke in Spanish) and said, "Corona, su rubia de categoría."

It wasn’t until the Mexican Olympics I968 that Mexicans began to trumpet themselves as the bronze race. There was by then a genuine effort to put away a racism imposed by the lighter-skinned Spaniards who conquered Mexico in the 16^th century.

But I was not going to adopt any of those ideas. It was in 1968 that I saw (from behind) a blonde woman with very long hair, wearing a mini-skirt to show off her legs. I determined then that I was going to marry her. And I did.

Sometime in 1979 I was befriended by the son of the Chief of the Mexico City Police who had been sent on exile (for safety reasons) to Vancouver. He had a neat business of importing shoes into Canada that were made by Mexicans in Mexican prison. He liked to come to my house to build my collection of 1000-plus jig-saw puzzles. One day he asked me to photograph his lovely Mexican girlfriend who happened to be blonde (not a real one to my eyes).

Rhododendron 'Golfer' July 17 2017

Rhododendrons have a great reputation in my city of Vancouver because they thrive in our cool and rainy weather. Some Rhododendrons do not like harsh direct sunlight.

Many of the rhododendrons here have lurid colour of red, orange and shocking pink. Those colours seemed to be the only available until Nixon went to China and the subsequent opening of the forbidden kingdom.

There are rhododendrons with other colours and quite a few that have scent. One of my faves Rhododendron decorum has white flowers that smell of ripe watermelon.

After their burst of flowers in the spring rhododendrons can be boring. But that should not be the case. Many have interesting leaves with indumentum. This is a covering of little hairs, fuzzy at times like the inner ear of a cat. The indumentum can be on the bottom side of leaves and it is then called tomentum.

In years past I used to take my then young granddaughter Rebecca to the rhododendron walks in VanDusen and at the UBC Botanical garden and I taught her to rub the underside of rhododendron leaves. She was charmed.

Not too long ago I visited my plantsman friend Alleyne Cook and his wife Barbara (a plantswoman) at their garden in North Vancouver. I spotted an interesting smallish rhododendron (notice how I avoid that ugly word rhodo) with an almost white tomentum. I asked him what it was. He replied, “Golfer.”  I asked again and he repeated himself. I asked again and he finally shouted (with his New 

Zealand accent, “Golfer!” I got the message.

My mother used the term “the Real McCoy” since I can remember. I am not sure that folks born in this 21^st century would use the term or be familiar with it. Perhaps they might say, “the real thing.”

Or as in ads in that last century, “Only butter is butter.”

In my photographic life I have always attempted to be genuine and not to attempt to fool people with what or how I do stuff. I eschew all those social media photographs where people confess, “Captured without filters.”

For many years (1957-1967) I avoided the use of green, yellow or red filters when I shot with b+w film. My philosophy was that the filters would enhance reality and thus the new reality would be fake. But I found out that particularly yellow filters compensate for the fact that film (all film, colour, b+w, video and digital) is sensitive to ultraviolet light. Humans cannot discern UV. Thus a dramatic sky will be rendered less so by unfiltered b+w because the film’s sensitivity to blue will make the sky lighter. So clouds will not contrast as much. The yellow filter makes b+w film more like the human eye.

Some of us know that deep red filters on b+w film and b+w movie film (when underexposed) give us night for day in those Westerns with puffy clouds. The red filter at the opposite end of the spectrum (from blue) will become black.

And so I have used filters since.

The deep red filter is part of the package that we who used to shoot Kodak B+W Infrared Film (I still shoot it as I have many rolls of this discontinued film in the fridge). When you used the filter with the film you had the problem that anything red was rendered much lighter (good for removing blemishes or freckles from redheads) and lips looked ghostly. I learned to use purple or blue lipstick so that lips would look normal.

Another problem with the film is that you had to focus your lens and then go back to a little red mark on the lens (good lenses used to have the infrared mark). This is because the film’s sensitivity to red light focused at a different plain of focus.

Seen here are three photographs I took of the lovely Virve Reid (she looks like a blonde because she was a redhead, figure that one out!). I have for no good reason tinted the pictures green/yellow. Then there are two additional photographs taken with normal film (medium format). One of them I converted to fake infrared with the Corel Paintshop Pro XII Infrared Tool.