Panoptikal*: Back to the Garden (Summer, 2007)

Friday, June 24, 2011

Back to the Garden (Summer, 2007)

It's been a beautiful summer so far, following on the heels of an extended, and rather cold and damp, transition from winter through spring. To mark the recent solstice I thought I'd post some picture of the garden I helped to build in the backyard of an apartment where I lived a few years ago.

Above: leaves on a lily plant. I moved a load of lilies from other places (elsewhere in the garden, and also donations from other people's gardens) into one small flower bed by the back stairs. They started thriving pretty much right away.

Above: a lily caught in the late afternoon sunlight. I ended up with a lot of orange lilies and some very striking, blood-red ones as well with what looked like stripes of colour pouring forth from their centres.

Above: luscious green of a sage plant in afternoon sunlight. I love everything about sage--its scent, its texture, the shape of the leaves and its uniquely mossy, slightly muted colour.

Above: another lily leaf, with drops of rain from a summer showing still clinging.

Above: I loved taking pictures of the plants as they grew and changed over the course of the spring and summer. The blue-purple flower above wasn't what I expected; it looked like a little slipper, and the leaves grew low to the ground in curling tangles.

Above: A butterfly takes a break on the edge of a pot containing a rosemary plant.

Above: Lettuce-leaf basil. The basil grew rapidly and the leaves lived up to their name. This year I have about five different kinds (cinnamon, lemon, large-leaf, purple, sweet...), but none of them look as lush as these plants did.

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More about...

The pictures I post here were taken between 1994 and today. There are some breaks during that period, generally because I had no working camera, or because I processed many negatives and made few prints (generally this is the case for 1994 to 2000 or so). I also have many prints from that time that have not yet been digitised.

The reason I call this a "photojournal" is that I tend to document my life with images, where possible, rather than words. I find it much easier to remember moments, and then events, when I have some kind of picture with which I can associate them. This is probably why I've always taken pictures when I could--even when there was "nothing" to photograph--and why I have such a difficult time keeping up a written diary or journal of any sort.

Technicalities

I've used a number of cameras over the past 15 years or so. The bulk of these were SLR, manual or semi-automatic, and of course non-digital (35mm film) cameras (photos shot from 1994 to 2004, roughly), though for a period I used both (low-quality) digital and film (around 2002-2003).

I first used a fully manual camera when I was 14, which was borrowed; the first SLR that I owned was a Vivitar, which rapidly deteriorated. It was followed by a Pentax, and after that, the Minolta XD-11 that I have used for film ever since. I use it with a 35mm or a 28-70mm lens with telephoto and macro. In addition to these, I also used Mamiya 220 and 330 medium-format (120 film) cameras while at NSCAD in 1997-8, and very occasionally, I used an old Agfa range-finder (from roughly the 1940s) which produced 6x9cm negatives on 120 film.

The first digital camera I used would probably have been in 2002, and I used it periodically over about a year (it was borrowed). In 2004-05 I again used a digital camera (also borrowed; specs not available); I stopped shooting on film beyond 2004 because of the expense. Finally in October 2006 I bought a Sony CyberShot, 7.2 megapixels, a very small camera (not an SLR) that I used for almost 4 years before replacing it with a CyberShot DSC-TX5, in July 2010. This camera now travels with me almost everywhere and is the only camera I use regularly.