Blast From the Past - Mosconi
- Thread starter Worminator
- Start date
Thanks for that. Must admit that I wasn't a subscriber until about 1990.
That is a professionally posed shot. To me the smile looks like a used car salesman's. One chuckle, that blur of a person photobombing him. They used this on a magazine cover? That is another indication it is a pro shoot, the photo was shot with a slooow speed setting! Pre digital, it might have been awhile before the photographer realized there was a problem with the shot, too late to grab Willie for another try I suspect.
It is still a great picture. Decent shots of Willie are hard to come by considering his celebrity and travels.
Hu
It is still a great picture. Decent shots of Willie are hard to come by considering his celebrity and travels.
Hu
The first issues of Billiards Digest were:
Sep/Oct 1978 Jim Rempe
Nov/Dec 1978 Raymond Ceulemans
Jan/Feb 1979 Jimmy Mataya
Mar/Apr 1979 Willie Mosconi
May/Jun 1979 Pete Lhotka and Julie Bentz Fitzpatrick, collegiate champs
Jul/Aug 1979 Omar Sharif and James Coburn (Baltimore Bullet stars)
The Mosconi picture was taken during a special trip to "the elegant Palmer House Hotel". The photographer was Chuck Rogers.
That issue has an unrelated article about pool in the movies with a picture of Mosconi coaching Paul Newman. The main Mosconi article was titled "Mosconi the Magnificent" which is mostly an interview. The opening:
Chuck Rogers is a rather famous documentary (NASA) and commercial (Coca Cola, etc.) photographer. One of his clients was Fuqua Industries which bought Mosconi's company around 1973(?). He and Willie went to the International Sporting Goods Show in Chicago (BD's home) every February for years.
Here are Chuck and Willie:
Here is Chuck's most profitable photo (of the end of a road race) which Nike turned into a poster.
And here is a video of Chuck's life in photography, which I found fascinating. It's cued to the mention of Mosconi.
Sep/Oct 1978 Jim Rempe
Nov/Dec 1978 Raymond Ceulemans
Jan/Feb 1979 Jimmy Mataya
Mar/Apr 1979 Willie Mosconi
May/Jun 1979 Pete Lhotka and Julie Bentz Fitzpatrick, collegiate champs
Jul/Aug 1979 Omar Sharif and James Coburn (Baltimore Bullet stars)
The Mosconi picture was taken during a special trip to "the elegant Palmer House Hotel". The photographer was Chuck Rogers.
That issue has an unrelated article about pool in the movies with a picture of Mosconi coaching Paul Newman. The main Mosconi article was titled "Mosconi the Magnificent" which is mostly an interview. The opening:
BD -- Rumor has it Willie Mosconi was born with a cue stick in his hands. Is that true?
WM -- (Laugh) I really didn't start playing till I was six years old. My father was a professional boxer and after he quit he opened a gymnasium with five or six pool tables in the back for the general public....
Chuck Rogers is a rather famous documentary (NASA) and commercial (Coca Cola, etc.) photographer. One of his clients was Fuqua Industries which bought Mosconi's company around 1973(?). He and Willie went to the International Sporting Goods Show in Chicago (BD's home) every February for years.
Here are Chuck and Willie:
Here is Chuck's most profitable photo (of the end of a road race) which Nike turned into a poster.
And here is a video of Chuck's life in photography, which I found fascinating. It's cued to the mention of Mosconi.
If you check out other photos from that photographer in the video, you will see examples of intentional blurring including a 3-minute exposure at the Cape Canaveral launch site and the bicycle race in the thumbnail above. He did kind of complain about how easy modern photographers had it with PhotoShop.
Might have taken a little longer, or a lot longer, but there are very few things that can be done in photoshop that couldn't be done in a darkroom. The great Ansel Adams claimed that 50% of his images came from darkroom magic. Kinda like old pool players, old darkroom workers had to know far more than photoshoppers do today. I was a fair hand in PhotoShop back when I was pretty seriously into outdoor and wildlife photography.
There was an internationally known photographer that had a studio nearby and we took pictures in the same areas for the most part. She came into her studio one evening when I was looking at an image of a workboat well on it's way to rusting away. When she walked up I commented that was a very familiar scene! She told me I should try to match the golden light she had caught the boat in. The "golden light" usually lasts about ten to fifteen minutes in the morning and half that long in the evening, if you are lucky! The lady was a firm believer in film, but then she sent the film halfway across the country to be processed and no doubt her film rolls were turned into digital files before printing. Anyway, I could duplicate the golden glow in less than a minute if I had low angle sunlight on the subject. Her picture looked suspiciously like the saturation had been bumped up a little bit.
It was an irritation even when I was taking pictures. I would catch a great shot and three-fourth or more of the posts were "great photoshopping!" I did photoshop one image, two eagles on a nest. They were about six feet apart so I snuggled them up a bit. After all, they were husband and wife!
Hu