Response to and now for something completely different...

I just walked up, framed the caption "Boot Hill", lowered to keep biker as bottom of frame and handheld the widelux, probably at 1/125th since the damn thing only has something like 3 shutterspeeds (I forget, exactly). The lens on the widelux sucked and I gave it up shortly after this image.

It (the image) was made at BikeWeek in Daytona, a media fest of incredible size. I actually saw some guy with an 8x10 on a wheeled dolly.

To clear out the background on this would have been more dangerous than making the picture. The guy on the bike was totally unconcious, I'm not kidding, a waitress came out of Boot Hill and literally took his pulse, just to be sure. When I came back by, about 2 hours later, there were some blue hairs (The Florida Geriatric kind, not the tattooed and pierced kind) making pictures of each other standing behind him as if he were a Disney prop or some kind of monument. That would have been a great picture, huh?

Look even closer and see that the guy with the hairy belly has a camera strap over his left shoulder (Image is everything at BikeWeek). The atmosphere was quite friendly. If you didn't want your picture made, you were in the wrong town.

The little girl, the nervous frat boys in the background, hairy belly dude and the smoking man all make this picture for me. Not to mention the sweeping landscape posture of the unconcious biker. There are four layers deep of visual info in this frame, all of which contribute to the cohesion. The only thing I'd like to loose is the telephone pole and the human fragment on extreme right. The coolest thing about the widelux, is everybody watches it work while the picture is being made. While the exposure on the film is only 1/125th, it takes the slit about 1/30th to complete the transit.

Wayne, I actually made a widelux neg carrier out of 1/8th inch black sintra to combat that neg poppin' problem. and James, I'd go with Fuji Neopan 400 today, it would definately handle High Noon at Boot Hill better than TMY. Plus, this was early in t-max's product life, before t-max developer. So it was probably soaked in FG7 with the sodium sulfite shooter, which was my standard for many years, and still is for Kodak's infrared. Thanks for the pat on the back, it sounds like we've had some similar history (nuff said)... t

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