It's a small world.

In the summer of 1999 I was contacted by the WCW to photograph one of their wrestlers, Calgary's Brett "The Hitman" Hart.  It was an honour to get the opportunity one of Calgary's Icon's as well as his parents Stu and Helen.  The photo's appeared in the November 1999 Issue of the WCW magazine and is one of the highlights of my career.

Tonight, 13 years later I had the opportunity to meet Brett's niece, Jenni Neidhart, who was invited to our class by one of my students to be a subject for them to photograph.  She did a wonderful job and has a lovely look about her.  She also has incredible eyes and I decided to make her my subject for my Instagram 366 Photo of the Day.  One of the students had brought in a feather mask and I decided to use it as a prop and moved in tight with my iPhone for the photo below.  Other then the crop and brightness adjustment no other post processing was done on the image.

When I returned I decided to pull out one of my copies of the WCW magazine and scanned these two photo's.  The first is a portion of the two page spread that opened the article.  The second was taken in the Hart mansion of Brett and his parents.  I have two memories from the shoot.  The first was just having the opportunity to spend a full day with one of Calgary's best known citizens.  I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know him and grateful that I had that opportunity.

The second memory was spending about an hour listening to Stu tell his stories and demonstrate some holds down in the infamous dungeon.  I was down there with the WCW reporter, Ross Forman, a decided it was better that I did not put my camera down lest Stu grab me.  That was a good choice as he grabbed hold of a young man who was one of the many young wrestlers who came to train and promptly demonstrated a number of holds that had the fellow screaming in pain.  I don't know how old Stu was at the time but he was still an imposing figure, especially in this environment.

I added the last image here as we had another lovely lady come in as well to model.  I took this image of Rubaa as a demonstration of lighting the background with colour gels.  This was shot with my Canon 7D with an Alien Bee 800 with a Larson strip softbox as the main light and an Alien Bee 1600 withthe red gel on the background.  The border was added after I down loaded the file using OnOne's Perfect Photo Suite 6.