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...)

SPECIAL OFFER FOR BRIDES!

Vancouver has had a tough winter, more like a winter back east than anything we're used to here, with windstorms and wind damage combined with snow and torrential rains. We missed a month of it being away in the Bahamas and Cuba shooting, but we've still had more than enough!

When the snow melted in our yard over the weekend, we were amazed considering the months of low temperatures to find bulbs pushing their tough little snouts out of the chilly earth. We found snowdrops, too, the diminutive harbigers of spring, with their white blooms still tightly furled. I'm sure they'll pop at the first blink of sunshine.

We decided what with all this new hope and new life springing forth it was time to indulge ourselves, and our brides, in an awesome day of studio and street photography, on us! Anyone who books at least a 6-hour contract in February, and who has a wedding gown she doesn't mind getting dirty (spares are available for under $100 on eBay), and who pays for her own makeup and hair, is welcome to a day of fashion photography around the Lower Mainland! Let's see what kind of trouble we can get in. Train station? Bus station? Gondola up to Grouse? Underwater? With urban graffiti? Romantic shots with your honey rolling around in the surf? (Oh, okay, not until summer...) Only limit? Imagination!

Cuba

Havana must be the most photogenic spot on earth. The communist politics since the 1959 Revolution that lifted Fidel Castro into power and US embargoes have forced the island city, formerly a US playground, into a weird timewarp. Colourful crumbling Spanish colonial mansions, classic American cars babied along since the 1940s and 50s, Latin and African influences, and a vital people who love to play music and dance--all these combine into a culture that thrums. You can feel the energy of this city like wind on your skin. Havana is a photographers' paradise! And hands down it's the best place in the world to have bridal photographs taken! All these arches and balconies and decaying castles! That's my new dream, now: to have a gorgeous Canadian bride with a willing wedding party and a day free after their wedding just to spend in Havana making awesome, drop dead photographs. Habana Vieja, anyone?

On New Year's Eve, we snuck out of a boring event put on for tourists to roam the Habana Vieja streets. On Calle Aguilar, we followed the irresistable sounds of salsa, and finally found dancers: lithe dancers, old dancers, child dancers the size of peanuts who are better at moving than I could be with a thousand devoted lessons. We passed over our bottle of Havana Club rum and tried to keep up, our bodies hopelessly spastic. Doors led to courtyards leg to rickety, half-gone stairs climbing high only to stop dead in mid-air. Slatted boards shaped balconies so old and decrepit they looked like they'd plummet with the softest footfall. I remembered there were streets around here where everyone walks down the center in case one of the houses collapses.

We wound our way down to Calle Opispo, ordinarily the shopping street (though its wares are limited), where folks on upper balconies tossed buckets of water down on unsuspecting strollers below, to shouts and screams. We dashed from the protection of one balcony to the next laughing as they caught one after the other of us, and made our way out, finally, drenched, to drink overpriced mojitos at Hemingway's pub, la Bodeguita del Medio. It was 2007, and we were a happy family in a happy country.