start
forward

Munich: The Stranger


hey... I was 18... trying to be a sophisticate
but the name stuck
and the photo won a 1965 Scholastic Kodak Photography Award
It even made it onto their Senior Scholastic Magazine cover

I also learned an important rule:
Kids: Don't give away your negatives for a touch of glory

..... I date myself... negatives are like vinyl records

This shot was a tiny piece of a Munich street scene
I noticed the man in silhouette
blew him up by putting my paper carrier on the floor... tilted at an angle
stopped the enlarging lens way down
and made a test strip to figure the exposure
See the vertical divisions?

I liked the test strip enough to keep it
and enter it in the contest

How many magazine covers have used a test strip?


So there was no negative... no one could make the same print again.
but I sent the original negative...... idiot
Thankfully they sent me a good copy of the original photo
which I scanned for this web page


40+ years later I would scan the negative
and morph the image digitally in Photoshop or Matlab

Would it be better?