Sunday, January 25, 2009

Ocean stars. Whale trail, Southern Cape, De hoop Nature reserve.

Over the last year, I have been working on small, but very specific, personal project. It’s got no time constraints or deadlines. I just want to put together a few images- with the same theme- that conveys a strong message. A message that I believe strongly in and one that I think people should know about: a small contribution to conservation. I suppose you could call it a photo essay (excuse the pun…), but I would rather see it as a collection of images of conscious thought.

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One of my favourite sayings is that “Life is too short to drink bad wine”, although I surely didn’t believe that in my student days… There is a lot behind those words and they ring quite true to the statement.
If a wine maker decides to make a good wine, first he has to choose the land, or the terroir, for the vines to grow on. This is very important: If the soil is too loamy or to clayey, the vines will either drown and die very quickly or they will produce fruit that is juicy, plump and only good for eating as a grape from the greengrocer.

Vines like hard, dry, rocky, unforgiving soils on which to grow. I can’t tell you exactly why, but they do- and once planted there, they need a lot of love and care. A good fruit for wine is one that produces a small fruit with all the flavour put into the skin. Why? because wine gets its flavour from the skins of the grapes, not the flesh.

So the conundrum for the wine maker: plant a vine in hard ground, water it too much and give it too much love and all you will get is a nice juicy grape good for eating. But leave it be and it wont fruit at all. There needs to be a balance- coax the vine, tease the vine with small amounts of water so that it thinks it must produce fruit, and it does produce fruit. But the fruit it produces are small and with little juice, and the skin that covers them is thick, full of tannins and makes for excellent wines. The vine works hard, in near unforgiving circumstances, on the brink of surviving and reproducing to produce a little miracle. So a very fine balance is struck- make the plant suffer slowly, but not too much- and from that will come the ultimate reward.
This is all very easy to say. But only the top wines in the world manage this formulaic balance.

Photographing the night skies may be an easy thing to say: pop out there, aim camera at sky and snap away. Well I found out it is not as easy as that so my little personal project: To photography night skies in natural, wilderness areas to show the beauty and vastness of the night.
There are a few immediate problems here; ambient light from towns travels a long way. You really do need to be in a wilderness area, far from any lights to not get any interference from man-made lights in an image.
Then, the weather… This has been the crux of the matter. Of the 12 nights in the Kalahari, 5 nights on the cape coast, 13 nights on the Mozambican coast, 6 nights on the west coast and numerous other nights in wilderness areas I can count on one hand the good nights I have had to photograph on. The combination of clouds, smog, and mist often contributed against me.

Getting to wilderness areas is difficult enough, but managing to find the right conditions to get good results makes this a story of perseverance. Watching the stars is becoming as rare as seeing a cheetah kill. This is more about showing someone the stars. It is showing the night skies as we are supposed to see them; when no cities were polluting the air and smog wasn’t a household word.
In this age of pollutants and city living, getting out into wilderness areas is even more important than ever, if only to smell the fresh air. Another part of being out there is seeing those vast night skies. When you see them, you know you are far away from anything man made- and to me there is great value in that alone.
That has become my project- to show people the beauty of the night skies and encourage them to get out into wilderness areas to experience those stars stretched across the velvet sky. If things carry on as they are, it may become even more rare than seeing a cheetah kill…

And so it is like wine- a simple project that teases, coaxes and tempts me for images. When at first it seemed quite simple, I found there is actually a fine balance between suffering and success. I hope in the end we see real reward of it all.

I hope to show you the final result of the project soon- for now, this image is from the Cape coast, taken on the whale trail hike.


Thanks to Pieter Walser for the late night call about the wine facts. If you want great wine, have a look at his website. Moment of silence took me by storm! www.blankbottle.co.za

Exposure information
Nikon D300 - 12-24mm lens
Exposure – f 5.6 Shutter Speed: 1024 sec (17minutes)
Exp. Comp. - 0. EV
ISO - 200
Flash sync– not attached, Exposure mode– manual, Metering Mode– matrix
File type– NEF (RAW)
Focal length: 13mm (20mm equivalent)
Tripod and cable release

This article first appeared on shemimages.com

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