Back in the day, before the great digital transformation I was working as a stringer for The Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto. Newspaper photography was an enormous amount of fun as you never knew what your day was going to be like, it was always an unknown, from a sporting event to a building fire. I was a working photographer on the streets of a big city, foot loose and fancy free. I appreciate every day I worked for newspapers as it was an amazing experience and it trained you to be a fast and prolific photographer, you had to come up with a viable photo in a very short period of time, sometimes literally, mere seconds. This was the case with my photo of the international singer Nana Mouskouri, but more on this later.
The camera of choice for press photographers at this time was the 35 mm film camera and it had been this way since the days of the Speed Graphic camera, press people always used 35mm. My personal choice was a Nikon F3 and two Nikon FM bodies with a compliment of three lenses consisting of 17mm-35mm f2.8, 28mm-70mm f2.8 and an 80mm-200mm f2.8. This got me through most assignments and was a good kit all stuffed in a shoulder bag along with two Vivitar flashes for off camera lighting, all carried on my right shoulder for many years and this is the cause, my Chiropractor says, of my bad shoulders. For those of you just coming up in this game take my advise use a backpack. But I digress! Back to my story.
Everything was ticking along just fine as it always had in the Globe and Mail photo department when a new Art Director was hired, who shall remain nameless but I will refer to him as AD. AD turned everything on it's head when he entered the photo department and announced that he would like every photographer to up his game and shoot editorial assignments with a Hasselblad camera, why, because in his wisdom he thought the square format was as he said "kind to the human face". He was right of course but he had a long row to hoe to convince most of the 35 mm veterans of his artistic vision. At that time along with my wife Barbara we ran a commercial photographic studio in Toronto and along with our 4X5 Sinar we used the venerable Hasselblad 500 CM, a lovely camera that produced jaw dropping detail and contrast in negative and transparencies, it was a favourite of mine and I loved using it. So with the new order at the Globe I was good to go but I never thought I would be using this instrument as a press photographer. So off I went in this new era of square editorial portraits with reprobated borders, what a hoot!
Hasselblad 500 CM with an 80mm f 2.8 lens and a waist level finder.
So, about Nana Mouskouri, I had been given the assignment by a photo editor at the Globe to get a shot of Ms. Mouskouri at the King Edward Hotel in downtown Toronto, now nothing had been set up and she was only going to appear at a press conference which if that is all that was needed I could just have taken a head shot at the presser. But AD had put the fear that all Art Directors can do so easily with us photography creative types and this dictated something more than a head shot. Now the King Eddy is a beautiful place and on the second floor mezzanine there are these wonderful Greek columns, and with Ms. Mouskouri being of Greek origin, well you can see were I was going with this. If I was going to get anything different and worthy of AD's appreciative nod I would have to arrive early to Hotel and set up one off camera flash on a stand with a shoot through umbrella on the mezzanine and be ready to go. I knew that Nana Mouskouri and her publicist had to come up the stairs to get to the press conference room. And thats were I waited, at the top of the stairs twenty feet from my light source and those classic Greek columns. After a half hour wait they finally arrive and as they are coming up the stairs I start with a smile to ask, request that please could Nana Mouskouri give me literally fifteen seconds of her time to get a good photograph of her for the Globe and Mail. Of coarse the publicist gave a resounding no to my request but Ms. Mouskouri being very gracious and if truth were told she probably saw the need in my eyes to come back to the office with a good photo. Over we went to the backdrop and I placed Nana in front of my preset light and took three frames of Kodak Tri X 120 400 asa film before the publicist brought everything to a halt with a loud "enough!". Because Ms. Mouskouri is the consummate professional she gave me a gift of this photograph and though I only got three frames off the middle frame was the keeper and as they say at the newspaper photo desk you only need one good shot.
The square format is kind to the human face, it works well with portraiture and today I am shooting with the Nikon D810 and often when photographing people I will use the built in crop factor of 5:4 which very closely gives me a square format and allows me to always shoot in the horizontal. As good as the Hasselblad was it only had one crop factor were as todays modern digital cameras give you options, auto iso, vibration reduction, autofocus which makes them far better tools than their analogue brothers, especially when your given fifteen seconds to create a good photograph.