Wow, I absolutely love having my own schedule to execute a long bucket list that includes downhill skiing, tennis, home renovation, grandchildren and gardening! There are about 10,000 negatives and slides to scan into the Mac; manage, sort, catalog, and distribute (where appropriate). Time is flying but blood pressure is normalized! One of my interest is the Avro Arrow; its design, engineering, parallel test/production line and membership (#41) with those who actually built it, fought for it and remember it. I’ve had a scale model made of RL203, Jim Floyd’s favourite of the half dozen made.I’m beginning to think others (students) might benefit from print stories of real doozie problems and how we solved them. As an example, how to print spark plug images close cropped on a white data sheet showing detail in the porcelain (ie 4c halftone dots) but keeping the porcelain appearing white! It seemed nearly impossible at first! Or how to print a hotdog in a bun with condiments in process colours on a solid lemon yellow fabric umbrella, still having the hotdog appetizing and natural to the viewing eye. I’d love to hear your ideas; then I’ll tell you the answers!

One of my first jobs was the prepress production of split print credit cards and loyalty cards. We had to calculate how ink would be altered by the heat when fusing the front and back together and make adjustments. Since most of the significant colour was spot colour, I developed a crude formula using PMS Bridge books to approximate that “burning” effect of lamination. As an example, PMS 185 would become approximately 485 once laminated.Because folding carton stock takes up floor space, cartons are printed in small quantities multiple times a year. To guarantee quality, I built a one bit tif workflow with an 8TB RAID so plate files were online all the time for those reprints; to make perfect matching plates every time, in minutes. A dkt slug was merged onto a dust flap at each subsequent printing without alteration of the original tif; for aging inventory control which clients found useful as well, especially for pharmaceutical and food jobs.I often would visit our work on store shelves to evaluate appearance comparing with other suppliers and learned many things for improvement; things such as variable rollover, under colour support on recycled CCNB, metallic ink adherence and especially a trap technique which prevented spot colour collapsing thin process colour areas. No auto trapper uses my technique even today! It’s something I was proud to see in our print results. Ask me about my method if you’re interested!

Worked at this prepress company starting in 1974, bought it in 1979, grew it tenfold, putting it under in 1996. Our two million dollar CEPS, high end drum scanners, cadograph etc were killed by the Macintosh. All equipment was purchased from Screen; IMHO, one of the best manufacturers in our business even today!There are dozens of stories I can relate; some funny, some frustrating, some about good and bad customers, nasty bank managers, interest rates through the roof, vendors blaming each other, high tech learning curves, rudimentary ideas that made for efficiency, my Japanese Lobster story, my embarrassing trip to Japan, helping a manufacturer improve their equipment’s results, being grilled at a trade show, graft payments, prepress cartels, dealing with huge corporations, large shop mentality, paying sales commissions properly, pricing incentives, doing extras for free, etc.

As a community newspaper photographer, there are few evenings and weekends off because that is when community activity occurs.Beginning colour separation for those newspapers and The Toronto Telegram weekly TV guide, Toronto Week was a way back to more conventional hours of work, something I strived for.And yes, there are stories like the day I tripped PETrudeau, dealt with a drunk govt minister, nearly fell out of a Buffalo aircraft climbing over the CNE grandstand, managing an SLR camera’s mirror, why a mightylight, knowing your 35mm film, salt water and optics, shooting at a fire or in a hurricane, weather photos, making women in portraits look twenty years younger, looking for facial expression, cigar photos made money, anytime press passes, and it goes on and on.