my hero

Last night my father turned 74 years old. It's very rare that I make photographs of my parents.

Anyway, to make a short story long, after we went out for sushi, we came back to my place and I asked him if I could make a portrait of him for his birthday. I told him that I wanted to shoot him in a black t-shirt, so he would need to change.

My camera of choice: A 4x5 SpeedGraphic loaded with Polaroid Type72 (400) film and an 8x10 Korona with a lens from the turn of the century and type 809 Polaroid.

I shot a few 4x5's to warm him up, and then busted out the 8x10 with only 1 sheet of Polaroid.

I chose not to process any of the film while they were there. After they left, at about 11:30 I got anxious to see how the film turned out, I picked a 4x5 at random— loaded, then pulled.

Bam! There was the shot I had waited my whole life to produce. The man whose father killed himself when he was 11, the man who helped support his mother and sister, the man who was given so little and has given so much. The man I call, my hero.

Anyway, the moral of the story: pick up the camera and take action. I think it was Richard Avedon who bubbled something about "Happy Accidents."

(There's a magic that comes with shooting film, that digital can't touch. And this was one of those moments. I love the marketing campaign that Polaroid used awhile ago as a rebuttal to digital "Apparently, Instant wasn't fast enough.")

Tech notes: I took the Polaroid and scanned it on an Espon 4870 flatbed scanner and printed to an Espon 9600 printer, on Somerset Velvet, 40x60 inches. It's beautiful.