Pbase photographer Rusty Latshaw http://www.pbase.com/russellt ) recently spent a couple of days shooting in downtown Phoenix with me as part of a one-on-one tutorial session. We spent several hours searching for images together in a senior citizens residence, housed in what once was the lavish Westward Ho Hotel. The historic hotel was built in 1928 and closed forever in 1980, but many of its treasures are still intact, including this fountain featuring a ceramic lion’s head. Rusty and I were both photographing it, but I had had no idea that his concept involved me. I guess he saw the whimsically incongruous connection between my hat, which I originally purchased to use on an African safari, and that ceramic lion I am shooting. Rusty used the same kind of camera to make this image that I am holding in my hand – the Leica V-Lux-1. Its amazing image stabilization feature allowed him to make this image in a very dark hallway, without flash, at a one-third of a second exposure, hand-held. The image I am trying so hard to make here involved shooting that ceramic lion in profile. It never made my cut. I am fond of quoting my iconic mentor Henri Cartier Bresson, who also used a Leica, (but not this one). He said, “You have to milk the cow a lot, to get a little cheese.” In this case, there was a lot of milk, but alas, no cheese.