I love the ballet. Watching  a professional dancer and being immersed in light and sound is a delight.

I have seen and met some great dancers. I have also been lucky to work with Sadlers Wells and the Royal Ballet for publicity work.

One of my photos was used on posters and in publicity at Covent Garden when the ballet was presented  by their touring company in the “Big Top”

I travelled around the UK with the company for a while, often photographing rehearsals, I experimented with cameras and films, one idea I tried was working with Infra-Red Ektachrome – this was a slow film so I relied on framing a shot where at least a part of the stage was ‘frozen’ for a full second and the heat generated from the dancers gave me  ‘pictorialist’ image of the surrounding action

One Job I had was a commission for a Belgian Book cover. My agent at that time was the Tony Stone organisation in London. They phoned me one morning saying they needed a specific shot of a dancer. Over the phone the descripting was different from anything i had and I needed to shoot from scratch on 5×4 Ektachrome. The problem was they needed the original by that evening to get it to Belgium.

This is before digital images or electronic transmission. I said they could have it in four hours and told them to gat their art director to my house by then to collect it.

I understood the requirement so got a dancer friend to come to my home, set up a simple lighting system in my blacked-put garage with two portable flash units. I had a small smoke generator to cover the floor. The shot was tricky as with the one key light at an angle meant that the exposure on the arms and body was critical.

As soon as the art director got to me, I did two exposures and immediately developed the E6 Ektachrome process – this is a 40 minute process and there would not be time for another attempt.

One exposure was spot-on – the lighting worked as I hoped and I got the subject exactly as I hoped. The second exposure was a fraction of a second out and the light fell off the arms.

I dried the good  transparency and the director sped back to London happy with my work. All I now have is the second transparency with the “off” lighting. There is density on the transparency and I could fix it in ‘post’ digitally – but I never do this – everything do is in the darkroom or with chemistry.

The end to this tale is that I am still trying to get a lot of my original work back from the agency. Tony Stone was great, but they later sold out to Getty Images who admit they have my photos and have no right to keep them, but I do not seem able to get any response from them. I guess I will try a bit harder sometime.