Seven Years

"... Mr Marley has been dead these seven years, he died seven years ago this very night."  spoken by Scrooge during "A Christmas Carol"

That line from the classic work by Dickens, really sticks in my craw this year - it has an extra meaning to me - Let me explain.

It was seven years ago this weekend, that my good friend and mentor Joseph Hakey of Wakefield Massachusetts passed away and in the interim, I have thought about him constantly.

You see Joe's passing was at the most inopportune time -like a passing can be at a good time - no I mean in his career.

We were all JUST turning to digital cameras, dit cams, as we called them, and Joe was fascinated by them.

You may have heard me speak of the Old Fart Press Photographers of the North Shore. Well many of those meetings were attended by and presided over, if you will, by Joe and at that time, we all spoke of the upcoming revolution. We really did not know about Megapixels and Resolution, or photoshop or CF cards or any of that. The cameras we talked about were two piece units or the Kodak DCS models - built on either a Nikon or Canon frame but still two pieces. Those were the days!

But we would sit in the darkened back room of that Chinese restaurant, and we would talk of days that had gone by and of days to come. It is the days to come that I miss talking with Joe about.

He had a unique view of the world, I will always remember his sage advice - " A fee is a fee is a fee...", meaning that of you got a job as a freelancer, do the best you could cause you were making your fee and that was your living and you needed to do it often.

We would speak of scanning old slides and negatives, old games and assignments we had done, and how the digital camera revolution would change the business.

It is that topic that I miss talking to Joe about. I wonder what kind of camera Joe would be shooting, and if he would have totally embraced the digital camera revolution. I often wonder what he would shoot for cards and how it would have changed his whole business model. Yes we were technically competitors, but that never really played into our discussions.

I really miss Joe and if you knew him and wish to add a comment or a memory I would love to hear what you have to say.