The cross processing look was huge in the late 1990s. I did a ton of it, as it did add a bit of nostalgia to the look of the photos. In the summer of 2000 a designer out of New York contacted me about my cross process work as he had seen it all over Getty. Wanted me to come to NYC to use the look on portraits of a bunch of Deloitte Touche execs. They were going to run huge billboard like ads in every major airport for a year. Because of usage the numbers got big, like $5k per portrait. They had 12 folks lined up. Biggest gig I would have ever had, assignment wise. And a piece of cake for me too. Go to New York, rent a daylight studio, have folks show up for about an hour each and I do my thing. No lighting, no entourage, just me and my assistant and the AD. But I had travel plans for September and the AD couldn’t arrange things quick enough. He didn’t want to interrupt my plans, so the job went away. I could have postponed my plans, or canceled them altogether. I mean it was a big paycheck. But I didn’t want to and didn’t mind the big job going away. I figured there would be more such gigs in the future. But there weren’t. Tech crash, game over. Over the next 3 years I couldn’t go thru an airport without seeing those images. All them looking like my work. Not only that, but apparently the job expanded to over 50 portraits, and 3 year usage. I couldn’t help but wonder if only… And yet I never regretted the decision to travel and enrich myself in other ways.
