Perfect marriage of art & commerce
Mick Jagg er, Albert Watson, 1992
Albert Watson’s powerful 1992 portrait merges Mick Jagger’s eyes, mouth and bone structure with the nose, fur and whiskers of a leopard – all without the aid of Photoshop. It was created for the 25th-anniversary issue of Rolling Stone.
Scottish-born Watson, a highly successful commercial and editorial photographer, had originally planned to shoot Jagger and the leopard sitting side by side on the back seat of a Corvette. While a Plexiglass partition was being constructed for Jagger’s protection, Watson experimented with a double exposure.
First he photographed the leopard on every frame of a roll of film and drew the position of the animal’s eyes on his Hasselblad’s viewfinder. Then he re-wound the film and photographed Jagger with his eyes in the same position. He almost threw the film away before developing it, as he thought the pictures would be out of alignment, but four of the frames matched perfectly.
Innovations and advances
The first optical-stabilised lens was introduced by Nikon in 1994. Allowing photographers to get sharp hand-held images at slower speeds than previously possible, it was a 38-105mm f/4-7.8 zoom incorporated into the Nikon Zoom 700VR compact camera. The first optical-stabilised interchangeable lens for SLRs was Canon’s EF 75-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM, which went on sale the following year.
The CompactFlash Memory card was introduced by Israeli-American corporation SanDisk in 1994. The company produced versions holding between 2 and 24MB. CompactFlash became the most popular of the early memory card formats, and is still widely used today.
Also in 1994, the QuickTake 100, manufactured by Kodak but branded Apple, was another step forward in the advance of consumer digital cameras. It had a fixed-focus 50mm lens and could store up to eight colour 640-x-480-pixel images.