Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/05/10

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Subject: [Leica] The making of a portrait
From: "A.H.SCHMIDT" <horsts@actek.com.au>
Date: Mon, 10 May 1999 23:32:03 +1000

I friend of mine, who is professional photographer, not a bad one at that,
sometimes allows me to help him at his shop. This normally happens on some
weekend.

About 6 weeks ago, on a Friday evening, one of his clients (some TV personality),
had a
sitting with him. He wanted  prints of a portrait of himself , to send  to his
fans.
The prints where to be B&W with a border and the bottom border was to be about
3/4
of an inch, so he could write on to it and sign it.
I was there to help setting up and to be of assistance with the printing.
Once the sitting was over, we sat down and it turned out, the TV guy was a real
nice bloke. He knew a lot about wine, he said. To test if he was right, or wrong,
we opened a bottle and then another and then.......
Very late the same evening, after a fair bit of testing,  he left and it was
decided that we would get the guy's prints ready for him by the next day. So we
ventured in to the lab. I mounted the negative in to the carrier and setup the
enlarger. It all looked real good. We where to make 50 prints.
It was real teamwork. I did the exposing (of the negative) and he did the
developing.
About 4 am we finished and after a last glass of the red fluid, I retired.
Next day my friend delivered the prints, and the customer loved them. He was that
impressed, that he ordered another 50, to be delivered in  two weeks time.

Two weeks later, the customer received his second lot of prints.Later on this
day, he phoned and said, he wasn't to happy with the second lot. somehow they
where different.
Could we look in to it. We had a look at the prints again. There seemed nothing
wrong with them. So we asked the customer, if he still had one of the previous
prints. He had.
He was happy to bring them over to us. I think he liked our selection of reds.
We compared both prints. There it was, quite obvious: In my slightly happy state,
two weeks earlier, I fitted the negative reverse in to the enlarger and the
prints where  the mirror image of him. This was the way he saw himself and this
image was more familiar to him.

Since this time, when a customer wants a portrait, my friend gives him the normal
and the reverse image. About 80% of customers reorder the mirror image.

Horst Schmidt