Marissa with Moose, Kensi and Honey

Advertising photography is one of the best rackets going for photographers. First of all it is overpaid and then the skills required are more in the area of being able to organize a good lunch for up to 20 people and cope with everybody there wanting the shot done slightly differently from each other, than it is in taking a striking photograph. Some advertising photographs, however, are among the finest pictures ever  taken especially the still life pictures of Irving Penn.

The pictures above are advertising pictures that I was not paid to do, neither did I have to organize lunch or have anybody breathing down my neck. I was happy to do them for the Animal Rescue Foundation of Beacon NY, where Caroline volunteers and it was taken to show how lovely the puppies held by volunteer Marissa are, and with the intention of finding the puppies homes. As these picture have had 15,000 viewers on Facebook, that will probably not be difficult.

Christmas morning in the wilds of Putnam county

The people and animals in this photograph are Betsy, her three children, Vic, Aden and Liv, their dog Bear and  the family cat George. On the left is their friend Marshall. It was taken on Christmas morning. When I arrived, Marshall, an acupuncturist, masseur and Qi Gong ~ Tui Na practitioner, was treating Liv for a painful jaw.

The sun was lighting the sofa that I was going to use in the picture. It was lighting only the lower half so Marshall unrolled paper that he uses to cover the patient’s table and taped it on the window to diffuse the sunlight. I put Aden and Bear into place as a center piece and the others fell into place  around them. The children, aged 22-30, survived well without their phones for the few minutes it took to get the picture done.

One thing I am getting better at: I do not spend time before a shoot worrying about what to do. How can you possibly know what you will have to do? You may well not have  seen the house where the shoot will take place and you possibly will not have even met the subjects. (Not a case in point with Betsy et al. whom I know well.) But my nervous disorder insists that I have a plan. Now, when I ease aside the worry about where the light will come from or will one of the group want to wear a roll neck sweater, (Oh, how I dislike roll necks!), I waltz in and wait to see what I need to do according to what I am presented with. I expect to sleep better now.

This is a photograph I took of Felix Salmon and Michele Vaughan which they to give to Felix’s father as a present. After clambering down the hillside outside their cottage we reached Indian Brook that runs through the valley. I settled them on the rock but saw that as the weak sun was lighting them from behind my shot would probably be better taken from the other side of the rock.

This meant their just swiveling round 180 degrees, but I had to cross leaf covered ditches and streams to reach a good place for my camera. They offered to help me navigate round the rock but if they had wound up with a sprained  ankle or even just wet feet the photograph could have been jeopardized. So I made it on my own but was grateful for their help in getting me back up onto the slope for home, where  we were restored to calm with ten year-old Sercial Madeira, the wine that saw General Washington and his staff through The American Revolutionary War at the rate of three or four bottles per person per day.

I met a British army tank driver once who had gone through the Normandy campaign in Wold War II on Calvados. The French farmers had kept hundreds of bottles hidden from the Germans all through the occupation waiting to hand them out to the relieving allied armies.