          |
    |
1968 Miami
Pop Festival Collectibles
The 12x18 Lithograph (reissue) of
The 1968 Miami Pop Festival 1
$19.99 Plus s/h
This is now available from the original artist on
Archival
acid free paper and Eco Friendly Vibrant Soy Based Inks
all done by a Green Printer
100 lb Gloss Cover is a thick high-quality, thick paper stock
that is excellent for posters requiring high resolution and
sharp imagery
we add a non-toxic, water-based aqueous (AQ) coating to make
colors
more vibrant and protect your printed piece.
|
Jimpress magazine Issue 87
This Story Is From
Issue #87 of Jimpress magazine
Jimi in Miami
Ken Davidoff gets told off!
It’s 18 May 1968 and Ken Davidoff is a young man learning a trade in his father’s photography business when Jimi Hendrix comes to town. What’s a young man to do? We’ll let Ken tell you in his own words. I got my first camera when I was eight years old and I started taking pictures for my father’s studio when I was about sixteen years old. So, he threw me to the wolves quite early. I was only taught one way to take pictures, my dad gave me this 35.5 Rolli which is a much bigger camera than you see today, the negative is two and a quarter square (about 5.7cm square) as opposed to the double postage size you would see of a 35mm negative. My dad showed me how to use this camera. Mostly it was with a flash, even in the daytime we would use a flash as a fill, to take pictures of people because it was mostly people pictures we were taking in Palm Beach. I wanted to branch out a little bit and I graduated High School in 1966 so you can imagine I was only two years into my photography career when Jimi Hendrix played a concert in Miami that I absolutely had to go to. I went down with some of my friends and I had my 35.5 Rolli, this was way before I learned anything about photography of concerts at night with available light. When you are taking pictures with a 35.5 Rolli you’re limited to the number of pictures you can take by the number of frames on a roll, which is twelve. You can only carry around so many rolls and I was only eighteen years old at the time, maybe even a little younger. I had some black and white film and some colour film but it wasn’t a lot. Had to be very selective with my photography, maybe that made my pictures a little bit better because I had to wait for the moment. In the daytime I did quite a bit of photography but I knew I had to save something for the night. When Jimi came on at night I was only about ten feet from the stage and I was really lucky because back then the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Department issued a media pass and that media pass was like gold, it got me anywhere and everywhere. I was backstage at the concert, not more than ten feet away. Jimi came on stage and the first picture I did was a full length shot and you have to understand, this is not just a dinky flash like you would see on a 35mm camera that’s built in or something like that; the head on this Honeywell flash was probably about four or five inches in diameter and it’s powered by a 510 volt battery that you have to wear on a strap and carry on your shoulder. It weighs a ton. The first picture, BAM!, the flash goes off and I don’t think anything of it, it’s the only way I knew \how to take pictures of concerts at night, I was pretty new at this. In the second picture I moved in for a close up and you can see the flat bed that they were using for a stage and that sort of got in my way because on a twin lens reflex you have to look down into the camera, it was a close-up picture of Jimi and I was only about five or six feet away. BAM! That flash goes off and as soon as that second flash went off I got this evil eye from the guy behind the microphone and he walked up to the microphone again and he looked right at me, I was very close, and he looks at me and he says, in a very slurred voice, “There’ll be no more flash photography” and that sort of shut things down. I was still able to stay there and enjoy the concert but that was the end of my night. I didn’t know what else to do about it so I just stopped taking pictures, if I’d have known…a few years later I figured it out. So, that was the night that Jimi Hendrix gave me what for, shut me down, told me to shut up and sit down, put my camera away. Nothing else I could do about it.
Nevertheless Ken shot some of
the most amazing shots of Jimi that day in Hallandale, not the
least of which is this issue’s cover shot
which shows Linda Eastman (later to become McCartney, of course)
welcoming Jimi and Mitch as they arrive at the festival scene by
helicopter.
For Info Email
ken@kooak.net
Checkout our Other Site
www.kooak.net
Links
©Info
Webmaster Contact
Us
Kooak.net
Photographer
Blog
Your
Pix Festival History