Note From the Archive

By the time I auditioned as a piano player at Vera’s Restaurant (Vera’s Beach Club, Restaurant, and Marina), I had already gotten off track with the cameras (and, possibly, also the Cancun Cantina), but it so happened I got my (way-out-of-practice and with an old repertoire) chance while working on a book for Johns Hopkins University Press: Maryland Food Traditions.

For the writer (not I on that project), and for a while, I jumped often and got around a bit, but for near free (there was a very small advance) and going on six years when all should have been set and out and gotten in inside of six months, the project got old, old enough, in fact, to age the contemplated publication and press run into the paper-bound past.

Although you never know . . .

In any case, the pictures on the Hopkins project were all in, and I’ve kept them and migrated them from machine to machine and disk to disk and collection to collection lo these many years (just in case, there’s a DVD around here too).  Among the prized: that above of the much loved southern Maryland restaurateur Vera Freeman.

I will ask the writer on the Hopkins project for the write-up.

The restaurant’s web page has a page about her, may she rest in peace.

I’ll also see if I can find the notebook for the shoot and discover if there’s something to add.

Also, the above was recorded on film, probably Ektachrome 100 SW, scanned at 2400 dpi, and converted to gray scale, a long process and one now largely consigned to the history of photography.

Sorry, film stalwarts, but even with the now old D2x I use for weddings, it’s near impossible finding an excuse for shooting either 35mm or 6×4.5 medium format without a great subject plus an allocation of time and money to justify it — and sigh, I’ve got my share of dead old film bodies laying around this place: with the exception of an FM3a,  it’s the lenses that continue making me happy.