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| My oficina - 9 August 2026 |
This is what
I face when I enter my oficina to scan or to write. The first thing I see on my marvellous
new Acer monitor is this photograph of Rosemary and me taken by my
Yorkshire-born compadre (godfather of my youngest daughter Hilary) with my
Asahi Pentax S-3 at the botanical garden of the University of Mexico in 1968.
It is really my favourite photograph of the both of us as the memories behind
it fill my heart with joy and melancholy now that she is gone.
Something
amazing is that I have the original Kodak colour negatives and they are in good
shape. Better still the small drugstore photographs printed all those years ago
have not faded.
This new
(ish sold to me by my friends of EJ Phone Repair for $140) monitor puts a smile
into my face ( until recently that did not happen often). I can see my many
photo files with all the little pictures across the screen. Thanks to it I have
found many gems that I overlooked with my old Dell CRT monitor.
On the right
of this photograph that I took with my Fuji X-E3 there are two cameras. The one
in back is the Asahi Pentax S-3 that I bought used at Foto Rudiger on Avenida
Venustiano Carranza in Mexico City in 1962. It has become my Sword Excalibur
and I am using it a lot with two films. One is Ilford 100 ISO b+w and the other
is the long discontinued (many rolls in my fridge) of Kodak Technical Pan which
I rate at 50 ISO and is nicely processed in our excellent The Lab.
The other
camera is an Exakta VX given to me by a friend Gary Cullen. He said I should
have one. I am not sure he is right but then he owns a 1947 Tatra which I
believe is the most beautiful car ever made. The Exakta is for left handed
people and everything about its design makes it impossible that I will ever
understand how to use it. But it has a special memory for me as a similar
Exakta, a VXIIA was the camera that Jimmy Stewart used in my most favourite
film (after Laura with Gene Tierney) Hitchcock’s Rear Window with the incomparable Grace Kelly. And below
my portrait of the film’s villain, Raymond Burr, in a nice accidental double exposure.
