http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/24/gilbert-taylor-star-wars-cinematographer-dies

The renowned British cinematographer Gilbert Taylor, whose body of work included Star Wars, The Omen and Dr Strangelove, has died.

Taylor passed away at his home on the Isle of Wight aged 99 after a life which saw him credited with some of Hollywood's most acclaimed films.

While his work included Ice Cold in Alex, the Beatles' film A Hard Day's Night and Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy, he is best known for the first of George Lucas's Star Wars series.

"George avoided all meetings and contact with me from day one," Taylor told American Cinematographer magazine. "So I read the extra-long script many times and made my own decisions as to how I would shoot the picture."

His career in the film industry started in 1929 when he was still a teenager and was taken on as a camera assistant at Gainsborough Studios in London.

He worked on the special effects for the 1955 film The Dam Busters and turned down a Bond film in order to work with Roman Polanski, according to his wife Dee.

During the second world war, when he spent six years with the RAF, he turned his skills to shooting night-time raids over Germany after a request from Winston Churchill.

His television work included The Avengers and The Baron and he shot commercials after he finished with feature films in 1994.

Taylor was a founder member of the British Society of Cinematographers, which presented him with a lifetime achievement award in 2001.

He died on Friday with his family at his bedside. He met his wife Dee, who was 23 years his junior, on the set of The Punch and Judy Man in 1963 and the pair married four years later.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.