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| Despatches January 2008 : Monthly column as featured in Practical Photography | |||||||||
| La Digue is a small island, some 4 km across, maybe 20 minutes of leisurely cycling. A relaxed pace is really the only option, as anything quicker will result in profuse sweating in these tropical climes. When I first came here in ’93 bikes and bullocks were the only available transport, now there’s a smattering of cars, just a few, but it only takes two to make a traffic jam on La Digue. The powers that be who sanctioned that bit of “progress” need shooting. But apart from that it’s the same sleepy idyllic Seychelles isle, impossibly beautiful and really all you imagine a tropical island to be. And we’re here for 3 weeks. Life’s tough sometimes. This is a new experience, 21 days on one small island, and what’s more, I’m not here primarily to do photography. So, a holiday then? No chance, I’m here to write a book, Waiting for the Light. Faced with a deadline and the usual daily deluge of e-mails and interruptions from Bombay call-centres I’ve deliberately cut myself off from the grown up world, which can just spin without me while I get this manuscript done. Every morning I get up at dawn and sit on the deck of our hut tapping away on my laptop. Surrounded by the dense forest with the fruit bats swooping and the first tropical light filtering through the trees it is a scene of complete peace, perfect for contemplation. It does feel very strange to be getting up at daybreak and not heading out on yet another dawn patrol. It’s a routine that has shaped all my working life, and I feel vaguely guilty as I watch the light paint the treetops. But us blokes can only do one thing at a time, so the actual photography can take a back seat on this one, leaving lots of time for creative reflection and writing about our craft. That’s the plan. But of course I have brought my gear, it would be stupid not to, wouldn’t it? And you can only write for so long. So here I am on the rocks looking out towards Praslin at dusk. It is such a luxury to have this much time here, I can wait until the conditions are absolutely perfect for the shots I have in mind. Normally on our travels we’ll give 4 or 5 days to each stop, anything less and its difficult to do the locations justice; too much travel and too little observation. Slow down and we see more. I found this spot on our first perambulation and have been waiting for an evening when the sky is frothing with dramatic clouds and the tide is just right. Long exposures of waves breaking around rocks; a tried and tested formula that I’ve been hooked on since college days. Back then it seemed the height of creativity, now I feel it’s a bit of a cliché, but there are times when it just cannot be resisted and this is one of them. So I’ve my EOS 1Ds mk II on the Manfrotto with the wide angle zoom at 17mm as I strive to use as slow an exposure as possible. Now I really hope the boffins who knock up cameras back in Japan are reading this, because I don’t think they really understand our needs. They may think we all want cameras capable of ever-higher ISO settings, and some sports wallahs who shoot tennis by candlelight may. Personally I’ve never gone higher than ISO 1600. But there’s a significant army of us who like movement in our images; swaying vegetation, rustling trees, babbling brooks, blurry tourists, scudding clouds and lapping waves; all vital weapons in our armoury. No, we don’t want sky high ISOs because we can’t be bothered to carry a tripod. Yes, we do want to use exposures greater than 10 seconds for fudgey blur. And with digital cameras with default ISO settings of 100 or higher it’s often difficult to slow exposures enough for any kind of movement to be apparent. One attraction of working on my big 6x17cm panoramic dinosaur camera is that with an aperture of f45, a 0.3 centre-weighted filter (necessary because of the exceptionally wide coverage of the format), Velvia 50 film and reciprocity law failure exposures of several minutes are the norm, and the resultant movement effects are part and parcel of the feel of images shot on this format. My Canon can go down to ISO 50, but even so I’m often struggling to slow exposures enough to convey our moving world. Maybe one day they’ll make DSLRs capable of going down to ISO 6, but until then neutral density filters are a must for all of us hooked on blur. As the sun drops over the Seychelles I’m exposing as the waves crash on the rocks below. With a 0.9 ND filter on shooting at the lens’ minimum aperture of f22 I can achieve a shutter speed of 16 long seconds for the waves to surge and produce the desired mercury effect, as my old man calls it. Ideally I’d like to use an exposure of a few minutes, but above 30 seconds noise becomes an increasing problem as rogue agitated pixels destroy the tonal purity of our carefully crafted pictures. What can also be a problem using ND filters for long exposures is colour fringing, whereby the filter is blocking the visible spectrum but letting pass rebel wavelengths such as infra-red and ultra-violet which the camera’s sensor is sensitive to. To alleviate this problem I use Lee Proglass ND filters, which are optimised for digital use ie they block all wavelengths evenly. Here on La Digue I’m using 2 filters, the ND plus a 0.6 ND graduated to hold back the sky. Normally I try not to use more than one filter; to get the very best out of the sensor’s resolving power I need as little glass in front of the lens as possible. But sometimes you just have to, so the optical quality of the filters is crucial. Incidentally this is why I don’t adhere to the common practise of keeping a UV filter permanently attached as protection. Why fork out on an expensive lens only to compromise its performance with unnecessary glass? It’s like buying a 4x4 but not taking it off-road to avoid getting it dirty. |
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| I open the shutter, shuffle about until I hear it click shut again, and check the display on the monitor. Any blinkeys indicating burnt out highlights? I check the histogram and dial in +0.3 exposure compensation. The twilight fades fast in the tropics and it’s game over before I’ve used much space on the memory card. I wander back along Anse Severe in the balmy darkness, past the stump of an old tree. In ’93 it was the setting for a quintessential tropical paradise image with the perfect palm overhanging the pure white sands and azure waters. It was a shot I searched the tropics for, and 15yrs later it’s still earning its keep. As the tree has now succumbed to the constant attention of the Indian Ocean its one image that can never be repeated. Maybe I should start the quest for its successor. Waiting for the Light is to be published by David & Charles March 2008. |
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