It may be work - it may be play – but whatever it is, to see it is to believe it

Some mean person, sometime, is going to want you to do some real work. If you are at all like me, you have already had your fill of work. It started when you were very young. It kept on getting more and more, and worse and worse as the years piled up (and on...). Folks used to tell you, “If you want to eat, you will have to WORK.” That sort of stuff is still ringing in our ears, isn't it?

Today was a day on which I wanted to play – not work.

Everything started off OK this morning. There was a nice big cup of hot coffee followed by an assault with one life-saving pill after another. It used to be that those pills were all vitamins, but the family doctor contends that it is of importance that I swallow all sorts of other kinds of pills, too – little ones, big ones, white pills, yellow pills, pink pills (yes, really), and even square pills. I believe the doctor is trying to get me to undergo lots of arm exercising by way of all of the pill-hoisting. Life goes on, does it not? Pills are supposed to insure that. However, my own belief is that it is old age that is doing the trick and making the doctor think that she is the smart one.

I had a pleasant meeting with my buddy toward lunchtime. Being on a diet (again because of the doctor's version of things) my lunch came down to a cup of hot tea and some dry toast. The pain really hit from such a feed. It was not because the tea and toast caused gastric havoc or irritated the esophagus. It was watching my friend down a great big bowl of broccoli-cheese soup followed by his ingestion of a huge sandwich and lots of nice greasy potato chips. Pain like that is tough to endure.

We split following lunch, he going on his way and me on mine.

I was on a mission to learn how much poster-size photo prints cost at one of the office quick-print places. I learned that the office quick-print place would make large size ink-jet photo prints for me for just $7.25 per square foot of printout. They would round the price up to the next higher square foot, but that seemed to be a good price for some really large photo prints. Score 1 to me on that deal.

In addition, I wanted to visit with the manager of the big “PlazAmericas” shopping mall. That was the mall from which I had been tossed some time back. I had wanted to produce a panoramic photo of the place at that time, but they would have none of that. The manager had never responded to my eMail requesting permission to make my photos closer to the buildings. Today, there still remained a desire to get closer in to capture better detail than I had snagged after being removed to the distant public street.

Onward to the mall I went. There I met with a very pleasant mall manager lady. She looked at me (with my "Kodak" expression and that camera on my belt) and asked what it was that I was after. I was encouraged.

She even had a nice name, “Liliana.” So, having had such a fine start, I proceeded to tell Ms Liliana that I wanted to shoot some “pix” of her place from close-in. She explained that she did not want to purchase any photos, even the good photos I had boasted that I would typically be making.

Her smile returned after I explained that it was not my intent to sell the mall any photos even though they would be superb panorama portraits of the place. It was obviously the proper moment to hit her with my real ammunition – the pano photo I had made from the sidewalk a month or so ago.

That is why I had carried my black notebook into her office with me. Inside were several panoramic photo printouts of her shopping mall. The first of those was a printout of the panorama on a single 8-1/2 by 11-inch sheet of paper. It went from one side of the page to the other, but it was really a skinny view of the place – attractive enough, but mighty small for a great big shopping center.

After Liliana got through admiring that shrunken down work of art, I flipped the page over to the next view. It was no longer on just one sheet of paper, but on three 8-1/2 x 11-inch sheets, each one horizontally oriented so that the photograph was not “skinny” and was close to 24 inches long. That view brought some welcome and admiring comments from the fair Liliana. She asked me to tell her when I would like to stop on by and make some “better” pano photos. I had already mentioned that I would give the mall a copy of whatever I shot as long as they gave me the run of the place to shoot what I wanted to shoot.

Liliana told me to telephone her when I was ready to roll on the project.

Then she pointed to the big computer monitor on her desk. It showed a fine color photo of the marquee of a movie theater. Liliana explained. The theater was to soon open its doors in the shopping mall, and both the mall people and the theater people could really make good use of some fine photos of the place. She agreed with me that the photo shown on her computer screen was very good, but that she thought that the kinds of photos I could make would be useful and greatly appreciated.

“Would you please run on over to the theater at the end of the mall and tell Bonnie what you do with photos and find out if you can help them?”

My mind wanted to get around that question. It quickly came to me that I might well be able to make some friends, make some “brownie points,” and open up some future opportunities by doing as Liliana asked. I wanted to see what was so special about a shopping mall movie theater, anyway. So, off I went to see “Bonnie.”

Bonnie was in the midst of being totally harassed by the commotion around her movie theater. The opening schedule calls for everything to be ready the day after tomorrow – and there is a ton of make-ready yet to be accomplished. Bonnie quickly passed me along to her big boss, Mickey. Talk about a fellow being stressed. Mickey had good control of himself, but it was obvious that he was close to jumping out of his own skin. All the same, he had the presence of mind to clear the air with me right away.

“I already have a photographer under contract.”

And, with that, he actually thought to see the last of me. Then I hit Mickey with a pretty good punch. “Liliana, that nice lady at the shopping mall's main office, thought that you might be able to use some good panoramic photos of your new theater, Mickey.. As I stand here and see what it is that you are putting together, like this really huge refreshment hall, the children's section, and all of the other things that you have built here, I believe that some great panorama photos of all of this would be useful to you in whatever you intend for your publicity releases now and down the line.”

Mickey asked me to please come on back to his new theater and make some of those great big pano photos that both he and I can use. Mickey is to be made happy because I am not going to charge him for the photos. I am going to be made happy because his theater photos are going to be front and center in my “show-off” notebook.

I may later decide to commercialize these panoramic photo skills. The outside-inside panorama photos of Mickey's place will then be a wonderful customer-grabber.

Not a bad day's worth of good fun for an amateur photo nut, right?

It was obvious that the old saying is still very true - “Seeing is believing.” In these two instances, seeing those interesting panoramic photographs caused my two new contacts to want more from me than, at first, they expected to want.

For me, it was the showing that made a super-believer of me. I intend to stuff that black notebook full of “seeing-is-believing” photos. Then, if I ever decide to really get on with the selling of the kinds of photos I now know how to produce, there will be plenty of pictures in the notebook to make believers of any intended customers.

Into that black notebook went a new printout of the panorama of a retail showroom - a pano printout covering a whole 360 degrees - "start here-go all the way around - wind up right back where you started."

The original required so many sheets of printer paper that the final paste-up covered more than eight feet in length. Here is a quickie photo of the printout (inside my messy little office). The printout was so very long there was not enough space in the office to allow a single photo to be made of the thing. Instead, I made a panorama of the panorama. How about that?

Here it is.