In photography I seem to have bursts of inspiration that take me into obsessive experiments. This past week it has been the combination of placing printed photographs on my scanner with objects. I wrote two blogs previous to this one.

Nostalgia with a scanner   Nostalgia & association

 Amazing to me it that this technique is one that would be difficult to reproduce just with a camera. My Epson V700 Scanner has the limitation of the size of the flat bed which is why I am forced to place my 81/2 by 11 inch print askew. But I like the result.

In my Bunny Watson procedure, in which I have stayed on in most of my 5769 blogs of associating stuff, that at the beginning might seem like a stretch, you might wonder what a Nikon FM-2 with a 50mm f 1.4 lens scanned the wrong way showing a crack has to do with the family photograph.

The family photograph I took in our early days in our large Kerrisdale house at about the same time that we all went to England, France and Spain. It was in London at St. Martin in the Fields as I was going down the stairs from the bell tower that the lens fell out of my camera bag and rolled all the way down. I am sure that the crack would not affect the optics but my insurance covered the purchase of a new one.

In a previous year I had gone to Buenos Aires and I was hit on the head at the Plaza de los Ingleses. All my Pentax equipment was stolen. The insurance company told me that there was no equivalent Pentax equipment that could replace what had been stolen. They paid for Nikons.

The Nikon FM-2 is, I believe the best mechanical film camera in existence. Without a battery, while the meter will not work, the shutter works just fine. And in fact, it works more than fine. The Nikon’s titanium shutter blades synchronized with flash at 1/250 second which meant that I could do my by then trademark style of mixing flash in the outdoors. The technique(called synchro/sunlight) had been pioneered by Annie Leibovitz for American Express ads.

The final connection with the photograph is a triply sad one and a doubly happy one. My Rosemary, the white cat Polilla and the black cat Mosca are gone from my life. Nobody can replace Rosemary but somehow (and I have written about this before) my two cats, Niño and Niña have in them the catness ( a Platonic one) of all our previous cats. As I watch them on my bed I feel that connection to those cats and think that in their genes Niño and Niña have the memory of having been stroked by Egyptian pharaohs.

The doubly happy connection is that both my daughters, Ale and Hilary (holding Mosca) came back yesterday from a trip to Huatulco, Oaxaca where they met up with childhood friends that had been our neighbours when we lived in Mexico City from 1970 to 1975.

I had missed being able to talk to them at any time and to have Hilary visit me usually twice a day. Ale, who lives in Lillooet calls me every day. It was pleasant and reassuring to see them and to glimpse a bit of my Rosemary in their face.

Hilary came over today and talked to me about the fun time in Mexico. We had dinner and all I could do was stare at that smile of hers and realized that with two daughers and two cats everything is fine in my world.