The Adequate Gardener in South Africa

So there I was out in the velt of South Africa, hot, dispirited, with clouds of bugs sheeting my LCD screen and me like, well, suffocation--up my nose, in my mouth, in my ears, landing on my skin like a new black shirt. The worst of them, flies that looked like honeybees, stung. It was our first day out in the field during Canadian photographer Freeman Patterson's Namaqualand workshops, and there had been, similar to my experience with his workshops in New Brunswick, plenty little information about what we were about to encounter. I would have liked that question answered in advance: Say there, how are the bugs?

I thought I would go plum mad, and so did everyone else, too, trying to hang on but at the last second flailing out instead of pushing the shutter to capture that one great shot painstakingly arranged. We must have been comical to watch--20 odd photographers doing a bizarre jitterbug. It turned out there were several precautions one could take:

1) don't wear dark clothing, to which the flies are attracted
2) soak your safari clothing in premethrin prior to travel, and
3) don't flail, it attracts them

But how could anyone fail to flail?

On the way to our field where I was in Photographer-Extremis, we'd passed field after field of flowers I actually wanted to photograph, blue lupins and swaths of yellow going on forever, only to fetch up here, per Freeman's say-so, in this rocky, ORANGE (did I mention how much I despise orange?) vista, a challenge. Did I mention it was orange? Did I mention it was hot? And noon, thereabouts? Did I mention it was buggy? I forced myself to take the obvious shots. I reminded myself to ˆseeˆ the way photographer Maurice Henri hastens everyone to see. Maurice Henri, man, he rocks my world. He's got a camera programme going with boy soldiers in Sierra Leone, and that takes cajones, huge cajones. Half-heartedly, I took some more shots. Sweaty and miserable, I moved to the shade. I tried an exercise of Freeman's...I stood in one spot and without moving, composed ten unique frames. I couldn't think what to do next.

Finally, bored out of my gourd and desperate, I plucked a few daisies and started spinning them in front of my lens. I'm known for my creative effects with macro work, and have a tidy sideline selling framed flower prints, and flowers for editorial and stock, so I was in familiar territory. I was seeing, finally. I was getting into the zone, which even on a good day takes a while. I was taking some pretty, pretty handheld stuff.

We were being instructed that day by the uber cool New Zealand photographer, Tony Bridge, who creates awesome landscape pix and has some pretty nifty takes on people, too. He'd spent most of his time helping a beginner who wasn't familiar with any of the buttons on her new digital SLR, but inevitably he looked over and saw me twiddling and spinning and doing every damn thing wrong.

Ask anyone. There are rules to macro photography, tripods among them, cable releases among them, all to prevent that devil camera shake. Any miniscule amount of camera shake is gonna show up in your pic and that's a for-sure. I started out in the biz the way everyone said I should, out in the garden covered in frost freezing my petooties off, fiddling with a tripod, my camera extended upside down from the middle post to make it low enough to catch a spring crocus in situ.

I got some pleasing shots, but being obedient was draining the fun from photography as quickly as juice runs down a funnel. I noticed things over time. Because of camera shake I was waiting like some idiot urban hawk for a moment when the wind died and no cars were going by to vibrate my tripod legs and hence, my camera. I was using all these deliberate, methodical approaches in order to capture nature as it wasn't.

The thing is, nature moves. Watch flowers next time you're near them. They're Cuban musicians dancing salsa; Bahamian dancers bending in a calypso beat; African drummers flashing their hands so fast against their congos you can't make out their fingers.

That's what's happening in the flower garden. Not all this stiff, posed, mannered behaviour that shows up in the perfect, staged photographs. Ever wonder why flowers are so pretty and move so fetchingly? They aren't alive for very long. It's flowers' life's work to have all their sexy bit on display, to do a little hootchie kootchie mambo-ing and reproduce fast. They can't do that standing still. They have to flash and preen a bit to get noticed.

I'm a photojournalist by nature. We don't pose people like mannequins or milk bottles. Me, I want to capture real time.

And why should it be any different for flowers, I ask you? Couldn't photographers take a PJ approach to macro photography?

I discovered my answer accidentally, when I wanted to take shots of magnolia blooms on a busy street and my tripod wouldn't extend far enough. I didn't have a choice but to stand on a footstool handholding. The wind came up, but I was there, prepped, and on a deadline, so I just kept shooting and expected the pix to be useful. To my shock, they were gorgeous. Better than gorgeous. Sexy and vibrant and almost edible. Not all of them, of course. Not many of them. But two or three were the best stuff I'd ever made.

It was a trek from those kind, accidental results to today, where my techniques are pretty out there--plucking the flowers and waving them with my aperture wide-open, for god's sake. It was a trek to a velt in the blooming African desert spinning a South African daisy while clumsily trying to focus and shoot. True, I could have used an assistant to maneuver the plant. True, most of the pictures I made were garbage. True, I could only do what I was doing in the first place because of the advent of digital SLRs with their spacious CF cards.

Tony tapped me on the shoulder. "I gotta say one thing. I really gotta."

"Hmm?" I said as if innocently.

"Jane, your technique stinks."

No way was I going to tell him I had a picture taken exactly this way on exhibit as we spoke at Kew Gardens in London, a winner in the UK Garden Photographers Association Awards. No way was I going to mention how many of these shots people actually bought to hang in their houses. No way was I going to boast. He was trying to teach me something, and it was my job as a participant to learn what he knew.

"Look," he said, "let me show you something." Tony took his tripod and screwed on my camera, then cast around for a pretty flower. He found one smack dab in the killer sunshine, in a little cove between two rocks, and marched me over. I was dying from the heat and bugs in seconds. He manoeuvered his tripod down as low as it would go, got on his knees, fiddled and focussed, and then asked me to take a peek.

Yup. Looked orange all right. Exactly like a still life.

I just grinned. God knows I couldn't argue. There was utterly no question that Tony was right, and I was wrong. Tony was absolutely right, and I was dead-rights to wrong.

What the heck. I blew hard to send flies scattering and screwed my eyes almost shut so they wouldn't divebomb my corneas. I pushed the shutter.

(But the picture below is the one I took the other way...)