blood sweat and tears: grafting an image Paris, 1975

The "final" version was the last I took of this scene. You can see it here.

The old lady was so absorbed by the shenanigans she was having with her dog that she didn't notice this hairy, crazed photographer six or eight feet away from her zapping away with his camera.

I almost never do contact sheets. I find them depressing in the extreme as poor shot after poor shot unfolds before my eyes. Knowing what will inevitably be in store for me, as idea after idea fails due to poor framing, wrong focus or misguided vision, I find the effort in making contacts tedious.

Instead, I rely on a quick perusal of the negatives to check out composition first and then a loupe (actually an old Nikon 50mm lens, in fact the one used to make this picture - my idea of "honorable retirement" for it) to see if the details are sufficient to justify a print (nowadays, a scan). I've always been right in my judgement, except for one picture, which languished unprinted for ten years after I shot it. Nevertheless, being of nervous disposition, I've always wondered whether my judgement of negatives was right on this pic (one of my favourites).

Going back through the neg folder and finding the original exposures has convinced me that I made the right choice from the several shots that I made of this scene.

The horizontal is awful... not just a weak picture, but the format doesn't work at all well. As for the verticals, I obviously didn't have my compositional "eye" in until I made the final exposure (the camera is far too high). Lucky for me! The images were fairly pedestrian anyway. Going back almost thirty years, I still can't excise the disturbing thought from my mind that even the keeper from these wasn't the "perfect" shot. I am nagged by the thought that I missed it somewhere between what you see here and what I finally presented as "finished" (maybe this is true of all photographers and all photographs). We'll never know. They're both dead now, of course. But somehow, they live forever... stretching a doggy neck for the piece of croissant and the permanent tease... "...mais seulement si vous êtes un bon chien.!". Rest in peace, both of you.

Looking at the scans, I realise now that I must have decided to increase the f-stop somewhat. The shots that go before have an appreciably blurred background, whilst the final version has more DOF.

Considering the keeper, I think it works because I finally realised I needed to move the camera down a bit further to get more of the scene (the bag and the fox-tail are quite significant here too). Also, the dog has a better profile than in the rest of the images (silhouetted much better too, against the raincoat). The whole thing is more evocative than the other shots. They are just images of a lady with her dog. The preferred version is a more complete photograph of "Paris" and its way of life; better focussed and framed, better technically and better conceptually.

And look how sharp that Nikon 50mm f1.4 lens is!