Scrapbook Scrap No 2

It must've been sometime in the late 1970s, and a full page ad. in The Sunday Times Magazine. I'm ashamed I don't know which agency to credit, because this was an utterly original idea at the time. And still would be now really. It was part of a series that included Spike Milligan's Pentax with a face drawn on the silvered upper part of the body. Naturally. But being an uber fan of Ken Russell films I got particularly excited by this, and thought of all the shots it had taken and how it might've got that beautifully distressed look. Ken was a highly original photographer even before he started making films and his career took off with Monitor and Omnibus programmes at the BBC. I like to think that the absence of a strap was a personal choice rather than an art director's whim, because all the straps for cameras I've bought still lie unused in their cellophane packaging. I know it increases the possibility of a camera taking flight to possible destruction, but I feel hindered by them. I've only had one  photography equipment disaster (he says, gripping a wooden desk), and that was whilst changing a lens on a Northumbrian beach. The 28mm winged its way out of my hand in a slow but graceful arc in order to land on wet sand that subsequently gave it a very disturbing grinding feel when changing f-stops. A man in an attic in Epsom sorted it all out.