My experience in production begins in the twilight years before computers began to change our life.

After graduating Brooks Institute of Photography with a Bachelor of Professional Arts Degree from the University of Southern California, Illa Vista Campus , Santa Barbara in 1969 I opened a commercial & industrial photographic studio in Edmonton.

This was my beginning in heavy industrial and illustrative photography. I had the good fortune to be Northwest Industries favored photographer and had the opportunity to accompany the first and many subsequent oil ventures above the Arctic Circle. My commercial assignments were largely regional providing newspaper photography for the Hudson's Bay Company, Woodwards, and Eatons chains.

This was also the first time that I ventured into what was then slide tape, with the state of the art in 1970 as a fixed dissolve triggered by a 1000hz tone. As the objective was a six projector show this required using separate tracks of a tape recorder for each set of two projectors.

After a short foray into the cut and thrust world of cheep 16mm film commercials in California I decided to move to England and pursue high end illustrative and architectural photography. Of note and available as a portfolio presentation of 11 X 14 prints. The pinnacle of this was being the assigned photographer for Dunhill catalogue work for 18 months. To you art directors this ment no dulling spray, no retouching of gold and silver products which demanded excellence.

Returning to Canada I assumed a position as a photographer with The A.V. House in Toronto. AV House was one of the leaders in presentation technology. State of the art was a Show-Pro II from AVL which was a punch tape programing system for multi-image presentations. My responsibilities grew as I took over and created many innovative cost effective animation producers and techniques for this exploding medium. As history will remember the available cameras of the time provided poor registration and even the best "Oxbury" had to be carefully tuned to provide professional results. As a result my knowledge of mechanical considerations and practices concerning film transport mechanisms was honed to a fine edge.

Notable presentations on which I was technical director, or Director of Photography in this no rules industry were:

A is for Azilda a 64 Projector entertainment installation, Dominion Stores National Meeting, an early Video, Slide & Live presentation, Yamaha, Bombardia (Ski Doo), Ford and many others.

Getting the finished product into distribution was the problem. I began to work on a way to solve the transportation and staging of slide tape or multi-image shows as they were known.

This quest led me to the development of a optical multiplexer. For those of you in NYC I had Slide Transfer Services and Producers Optical Services operating a full six months before John Stapsy brought his six projector unit to the NYC market. The value of that time was not the kudos, but the satisfaction I gained from working with producers across the world to turn their art into distributable products. To help bring the Association of Multi-Image International Recommend Production Practices into being.