[Leica] mosquitoes and shooting....

[Kyle Cassidy <cassidy@netaxs.com>]

i'm sure i'll be telling the rest of this story in bits and pieces for
weeks, but this relates somewhat to mosquitoes and leica shooting so i'll
tell this bit now -- for the past several months at work i've been
working, almost exclusively, on a large tri-fold brochure. it has one
16x11 image on the front and several other images inside ... the text of
the brochure is something that the various constituant comitties have been
bickering about for many days now and they'll continually call me asking
"can you change paragraph 2 sentance 1 to read 'shot in the eye' rather
than 'shot in the face' and print one our for us to see?" so thursday is
the day this baby goes to the printers and last friday someone says "you
know, we absolutely cannot use the cover image. we need something new." at
which point in time i had a heart attack and was dead for several minutes
until someone revived me by kicking me in the head and splashing water on
me. i tried to explain that a) the image on the front was _perfect_ and i
was planning to base the rest of my career as a photographer on it, and b)
the time it would take to do reshoots and relayout would be, well,
prohibitive. at this time, one of the committies says "oh, that's not a
problem, we found an image that works, just steal this 400x600 image from
this website (www.whatnot.org/blah/blah/blah.jpg) and use that! you don't
have to reshoot at all!" i tried to explain then that a) we didnt' have
the rights to use that image ("can't you alter it in photoshop?" -- the
catch all magic word these days) and b) once i streached that 600 dot
image to 9600 dots each of those dots would be the size of a box of
matches. at which point in time it was decided i'd go out and reshoot this
weekend. well, friday night, a friend arrives unexpectedly from out of
town and i'm forced to remain up until 5 in the morning drinking bloody
marys and reminiscing about college, then up at 10:00 the next day
shooting subway cars until 9:00 at night. when i got home i felt like
someone had been beating me with bags full of ivory soap all evening. i
had a feaver of 100', a stiff neck, and some crazed sinus infection. i
crawled into bed but was absolutely unable to get to sleep. every 5
seconds i'd flop to my side, to my back, to my stomache, to my other side
(rinse, lather, repeat) the whole time feeling miserable. somewhere about
5:30 in the morning, in that vague dazed half-sleep where dreams become
reality, i became convinced that i had the West Nile virus and was
thinking that i should get to a hospital. i was too tired to get up, but
started feeling my arms for mosquito bites and found a bump under my
armpit, (which in the light of day revealed itself to be a pimple) which
for some reason i took as the beginnings of a swolen lymph node, now
convinced that i had the Plague i decided that it was pointless to seek
medical attention and to try simply to die in my sleep, since i no
doubt had only hours left to live. however, this plan was thwarted by the
cat, who around 7:30 decided that it was time for me to get up and feed
him. "one last round of food for you buddy," i said, "and then it's
goodbye forever". but somewhere in the kitchen i realized that i
didn't have West Nile nor the Plague and it was about time for me to get
up and start photographing subways again.

round two.

kc

p.s. i'm using the leica m3 with a rokkor 28 and kobalux finder. having a
grand old time. metering light with a polaris, shooting a mixture of
ektapress 400 and ilford hp5.