Capturing nature’s beauty
I have always enjoyed photography, and in particular, capturing nature’s beauty. But when I look at it honestly, this is really the only avenue that I spend time in. Family will leave and I’ll realise I haven’t taken a single snap. Grandchildren grow so quickly and my photo memories of them are scant. Yet a bush, like the watsonia, gets hundreds of photos. I won’t miss that. And the ponga too. The fronds only unfold for a few short weeks – I am snapping them nearly every night during this period.
This realisation of my nature-photography love only really became apparent a few weeks back when we visited Auckland with Genevieve. There was a magnificent rainbow stretching across the horizon, encompassing big high-rise buildings in its path. I took a few shots, then realised that these pics did nothing for me. Sure, the rainbow was pretty, but the body of the photo, the ugly housing complexes, sterilised the scene. It was then that I realised that I love nature in its purest form, without man-made structures ruining the shot.
I know there are plenty of award-winning building photos, they just aren’t my thing. A rustic barn, I wouldn’t mind, but not the concrete monstrosities that abound around the urban environments.
My camera now, is my phone. It doesn’t always capture the colours as I see them, but that is half of the fun of taking the photos, to see later how they actually look. These light-weight inventions are marvellous, always on hand when needed and so easy to pack in a little bag, if one is walking. I don’t often take my phone with me down the beach and have missed some brilliant lighting shots or patterns, then when I do take it, these are often missing, but that’s how it goes.
Once, some years back, when I took my large Minolta camera to the Gold Coast, I dropped it and it stopped working. When I enquired about insurance, I was told that it wasn’t covered because I was out of the country. I was aghast. Is a camera meant to stay in one’s house? It did seem absurd.
When I did my big OE, I bought my first SLR camera duty free as I left the country. It was a big expense at the time but was something I had always wanted. This camera had an intermittent fault and when I was about to snap ‘that shot’ it would jam and it would be some time before I could take photos again. It only ever seemed to happen when I was taking good shots. I always wondered if my excited energy had something to do with it. The problem was never rectified as whenever I took the camera to the shop, it worked perfectly. One man even asked me if I knew how to work a camera.
So, the advent of the cell phone camera has been a blessing for me. I have compared photos using my SLR and the phone and really can’t tell the difference. It is so much easier to pack a phone than a large camera. My cellphones have always had good quality cameras in them, that’s something I make sure of when buying one. In fact, with my last purchase, I was tossing up between a Samsung which I have always had and another brand. It was people’s reviews of this other brand about the poor quality of the green, that I decided to stick with my Samsung.
When I was younger, I always had a dream to create posters using nature photos I had taken, and meaningful sayings, which is something I never did. I guess my blogs are my inspiration for keeping taking the photos as I need a new one each day.
Today’s pic is a night time shot of the watsonia, a bush that has been providing a magnificent display these past few weeks.