B. has always been a reticent subject for portraiture. She thinks the process should be quick, painless and infrequent. It may have been misguided for her to marry a photographer. Especially one who is much more interested in making portraits than taking landscape images.
We went to Sweetish Hill Bakery at least once a week for about 30 years. Coffee and pastries. Eventually the beloved owners and originators aged out of the business and sold it to a fashionable but mostly soulless restaurant group. They've turned what was once a neighborhood bakery into a frou-frou enterprise; Doubling the prices of the products and cutting the quality in half. Pre-pandemic it had become newly chic.
I can't recall ever going to the bakery without a camera over one shoulder or the other (usually the left...) and on this foray I'm sure it was a Leica CL. I used the 40mm lens and got a bit too close. I should have bought a 90mm for that camera but I always considered it to be a quintessential point-and-shoot camera. I also didn't think the finder was very accommodating for use with longer lenses.
At the time I probably overlooked this image because I didn't like the wide angle perspective and the way it worked to change the geometry of B's face. Now I find the image a wonderful artifact/treasure from an age where cameras were always full frame and nearly always just eccentric enough to enjoy.
Tri-X all the way. And, no, that's not a digital frame edge, that's the effect of filing out your own personal negative carriers. Unique.
