Hand it over! ..

There was a time when, now and again, you'd shoot a PR job and then have to hand the film over to the PR company. Various reasons - the company might want to take the film back to process in London, for example, or deadlines were tight and there was no time to get prints across to a company. (There was no duplicating of images onto parallel memory cards, or getting photographs emailed back to you after the job in those days!) The thing is, I did it twice when it really hurt! Once was when I photographed a band called Take That - who you may have heard of!! - but who were the support at a Radio One roadshow I was shooting, and once when I was the official photographer to the Queen. She opened The Festival of Food and Farming in Hyde Park in 1989, and I was the only photographer allowed to cover her doing the honours for the sponsors, ASDA supermarkets, who took all the film back to their HQ to make a big song-and-dance exhibition of it all. Well, I've long given up on the Take That shots, but I've been trying to get hold of some of my photos of Her Maj to show you in her Jubilee Year. The thing is, I don't think half the staff in the offices there were even born when I shot them, so trying to explain about negatives is unfortunately falling on stony ground.  However, the search goes on, and I'll keep you in the picture .. but you can't have the film!! By the way, the picture today shows me -aged 18 or 19- shooting Princess Anne on a visit to Manchester! I can't remember who gave me this print, but at least somebody kept hold of their negatives! ;-)