Saturday, November 4 1995

4th and Market Street, San Francisco

Sunday morning, 5:30 AM, can't sleep.

This photo was not shot with a long lens as its apparent shallow depth of field implies. In fact it was taken with a fixed 35mm wide lens. I have digitally jimmied its background to blur, an effect that a long telephoto lens with a short F stop delivers. God bless Photoshop. This is the second photo in this column of other photographers working in the field. I guess I enjoy capturing behind the scenes images of my brother and sister "shooters." I am really jazzed with the immediacy of shooting digitally, jamming with the image through my Mac "box" and then lobbing it out to you there in Cyber.

I'm pumping a new (old) Lionel Hampton CD through MacAttack , my trusty home computer. The CD arrived last week, a "gift" from Crescendo records. It seems that a few weeks ago I was pouring through a CD rack of music (is 'record' rack used anymore?) and I discovered an old friend on the back cover ... a killer photo of mine of Lydia Pense, lead singer of Cold Blood.

It turns out that Neil Norman of Crescendo bought it from a fella named Michael Ochs. Now Michael is the brother of the great fallen folk balladeer Phil Ochs and is a specialist brokering musical photos. He also happens coincidentally to be my agent. Now Michael has a bad habit of finding old publicity photos and then quietly claiming "ownership." He then distributes them possibly leaving the true owner in the lurch. In this particular case I sold this photo to the group with a "one time publication rights" agreement many, many years ago and forgot about it.

So Neil bought it from Michael and Michael didn't know I owned the rights. I will deal with Michael soon enough. Anyway, Neil turned out to be an honorable man and so we put a second deal together which included him sending along a set of trés cool CDs from his catalog.

Now Neil is about to publish a second Cold Blood anthology and he's offering me a shot at contributing to the cover art. Some things do turn out well. I am busy promoting the possibility of the mighty Crescendo Records doing a Website with moi as its architect. We'll see.