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| Camellia x williamsii 'Donation' April 9, 2018, Fuji FP-100C Instant Film |
The proliferation of digital cameras and camera phones has
pretty well killed the concept of street photography. If Cartier-Bresson were to step into a time machine and come to
contemporary Vancouver he would be on employment insurance within a month.
Sometime around 1988 my Rosemary took me to a Vancouver Rose
Society meeting at the Floral Hall of VanDusen Botanical Garden. The chairs
were uncomfortable and after listening to the minutes of a previous meeting the
lights were turned off and more than 100 slides of roses, mostly closeups were
projected. Angrily I told Rosemary, “You have brought me here to sit on uncomfortable
chairs and to look at bad slides of Roses?”
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| Fuji FP-100C Instant Film scanned negative peel |
Since then I have developed an interest in going to meetings
as 1988 marked the date when I became obsessed with roses and particularly old
roses. But I swore never to photograph roses.
I have kept mostly to that promise to myself by having
scanned not only all the roses of our former big Kerrisdale garden but also all
manner of Rosemary’s interesting perennials. I scan the flowers and plants at
100% size for accuracy and I use higher resolution settings, around 1000dpi.
These scans I store as tiffs in my computer, in CDS and in a backup exterior
hard drive.
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| Fuji X-E1 with Nikon 50mm F-1.4 lens wide open April 7, 2018 |
Then this happened.
When me moved from Kerrisdale to our present duplex in Kitsilano
we had to play a botanical Noah’s Ark. We could not bring everything. Many
plants, those hardy enough to survive the Zone 4 of my eldest daughter’s (Alexandra)
in Lillooet, BC (which included the very hardy Gallica Roses we transported in
a big van twice.
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| Scan March 29 2018 |
We had four Camellias. We chose one for our garden. It is
the lovely Camellia x williamsii ‘Donation’. Alas last spring the buds fell
off. Rosemary was very depressed. I told her to be patient. This year it has
gloriously bloomed (right now).
A few weeks ago I scanned the first bloom. But that scan
does not show the bush in its present splendour.
So I decided to photograph a cluster of the flowers using my
Fuji X-E1 with its special adapter to mount my old, very fast, Nikon 50mm
f-1.4. Perhaps Should have used a tripod to nail the very shallow focusing that
happens when a lens like that is used wide open.
I was disappointed.
Then I took out my Mamiya RB-67 Pro- SD with a 140mm
floating element lens and put the Polaroid back (now for what’s left of my
reserve Fuji Instant FP-100C film. I was very careful as it had to be a one
shot deal. I believe it was. What you see here is a scan of the print and a
scan of the negative peel reversed in Photoshop.
But I did not have to show the pictures to Rosemary knowing
she would tell me, “You cannot see Donation
in context with our house.” So I took the photograph.
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| Fuji X-E1 April 9 2018 |
I believe that my many years in magazine photography taught me that there was more than one way to skin a cat. That Fujiroid print scan is pretty nice.