When I first listened to Paul Simon’s ‘There Goes Rhymin’ Simon’, released in spring 1973, I was swept away by the rollicking cadence of ‘Kodachrome’, the first song on the album. It was obviously metaphorical, but I loved the bouncing rhythm and the irreverent opening…. “all that crap I learned in high school”.  And it was Simon without Garfunkel, a big change from the 1960s and their hits, ‘The Sound of Silence’, ‘Mrs. Robinson’, ‘The Boxer’.

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away

1973 was a bit of a heartbreak year for me. A long relationship had ended and I was in a new job, in a new apartment near the beach in Vancouver, with four white parsons tables that my carpenter dad built for me, a mustard-gold Sears sofa, dozens of plants (it was the 70s after all), a brand-new attitude, and a brand-new turntable and Pioneer receiver (far right in the old photos below).  I played Paul Simon so loud on my new stereo that my downstairs neighbours often took exception and knocked on the ceiling, which of course was the essence of (One Man’s Ceiling is) Another Man’s Floor, from that album.

I still love listening to my music loud, and I still adore this album, though now I have the CD, of course. Sometimes, on the 2-1/2 hour drive north to our cottage, I just keep it in the changer and let it play over and over. Kodachrome, Tenderness, Take Me to the Mardi Gras with its New Orleans gospel vibe, American Tune, St. Judy’s Comet, Loves Me Like a Rock, the Reggae rhythms of Was a Sunny Day, etc.

But what about “Kodachrome”…. the film?  Fifteen years later in 1988, I was married with four kids, living in Toronto, and determined somehow to create a career combining writing, which I loved, with gardening, which I also loved. And somehow, I did it! I had my first piece published in my botanical garden’s newsletter that spring.  It was about my backyard pond.  Six years later, I debuted my newspaper column with the Toronto Sun. After my spring introduction, below, I would be required to provide my own photography each week. That went on for six years with this paper, (okay, it was a tabloid with bikini-clad girls on page 3 and hardly any of my friends ever read it, unless they found it on a streetcar or in a hockey arena dressing room, but still….), then another few years with the National Post. So I became a photographer, too.  And when I discovered I loved photographing plants as much as writing about them, I launched my own stock photo library.

In the early 90s, I used a Pentax point-and-shoot camera to illustrate my gardening articles and columns. Then I bought a new Canon Elan SLR. And yes, in those days (1990-1996) I used Kodachrome 64 slide film. It did produce Paul Simon’s “nice, bright colors” but it had problems, too.  It was high contrast, something that can be problematic in garden scenes in bright light. (And since I was never an early morning riser, preferring to work in my office late at night, I counted on overcast conditions for my optimal outdoor light.) Because of its unique emulsion (something about dye couplers), it meant that development of the film had to be done by Kodak or an approved dealer. When digital began to emerge in publishing in the late 1990s and necessitated the scanning of slides, it was apparent that the emulsion did not behave like the Fujichrome transparencies to which I switched after 1996.  (These are so old that the little kid with the beans in the top row is now a dad of a toddler!)

Today I have an overflowing bookcase filled with many dozens of binders of slides containing tens of thousands of pre-2007 images. Having switched to digital that year, I rarely pull out a binder. (The photo below only shows some of them; the rest are scattered around my office.)

But when I do, I cringe if it’s a Kodachrome slide I need to scan with my Plustek scanner (the successor to my first Coolscan scanner, below it), because it requires a lot of fiddling with the software.  I kept the old Coolscan as a stand so the Plustek insertion frame would not knock into my Canon flatbed scanner below.

Over the years, I went through a lot of cameras and lenses and photo tutorials. In 1998, at a workshop in New Brunswick, when the renowned photographer Freeman Patterson turned my camera from horizontal to vertical to show me the difference it made in framing a scene, I could only watch him in amazement. I wanted to see with his eyes.

My cameras came with me everywhere. This was me in Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery in the 1990s. (My hair was still mostly dark then….)

I’ve been photographing at that wonderful 200-acre arboretum/graveyard in all seasons for more than two decades.  Just one of my many ongoing projects.

Another multi-year photography project is the Torrance Barrens Dark Sky Preserve in Muskoka. One year, a cousin took me up in his plane with the window open (!)….

……so I could get some aerial shots of the Barrens with fall colour.

I recently had a night sky photography lesson there, with well-known photographer Wes Liikane. I blogged about that evening.

By 2014, I was juggling two cameras, one for wide landscapes, like this one at the Toronto Botanical’s Piet Oudolf-designed entry border (I wrote a comprehensive, 2-part blog about Piet’s design of this border) ….

….the other fitted with a 70-200 f 4.0 lens for intimate design vignettes and close-ups of my beloved pollinator insects.

Photographing on safari in South Africa was much more satisfying with my telephoto lens…..

…..which let me zoom in on the eyes of a black-maned lion just waking up.  (I wrote a 3-part blog about that safari at Kapama Game Park here.)

By the time I visited the Wellcome Collection in London en route to Kenya in spring 2016, I had purchased a lightweight, mirrorless 50x-zoom digital camera (Canon SX50 HS).  And rather than draw a self-portrait like the other people had done there….

….. I used my new camera to do a mirrored selfie. (Well, I needed one for Instagram!)

My new zoom telephoto camera had pretty good video and let me focus at a safe distance on the cheetah brothers roaming the savannah at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Laikipia, Kenya a few weeks later.

I’ve had some magazine covers over the years, and many self-illustrated stories inside the pages.

I loved this cover because it illustrated my story inside the magazine on my wild meadows at our cottage on Lake Muskoka.

Indeed, our cottage is where I indulge in my love of nature photography….

…. using my own meadows and wildish garden beds……

…… and hummingbird-friendly containers as my muses.

I’ve done some smoke and mirrors fine art photography over the years. Especially in spring, after six long months of winter.

And I’m crazy about autumn, so I’ve used my light table to create some fall colour fine art…..

….. then had a photography show at the perfect time of year.

But seriously, my old slide light tables are mostly used as superhero or cute-kitten tracing centres now….

….. and most of my non-floral photography these days is devoted to my three grandkids. I’ve made a gallery each year filled with photos and videos and I keep them in a private folder on my Smug Mug site.  A gift to my daughter and son-in-law.

But Smug Mug is also where I keep my bees and butterflies and birds and all the plants I’ve managed to keyword and upload to date, which is about 10% of the total. Sigh……

All those years, all those days spent in gardens with cameras… sometimes three of them… slung over my neck, often for 6 or 7 hours straight. Thank you, Naomi Brooks, for recording the moment on that hot August day in 2016 on New York’s High Line when some helpful tourist suggested I get some harness contraption that would keep all the camera straps straight. That really sounded too logical to me!

Though I’ve spent more hours alone photographing in gardens than I could begin to imagine, from time to time, I had a dear photographer friend, Virginia Weiler (aka Ginny) who would bring her camera from her home in North Carolina and we would play like kids together in various photogenic places that piqued our fancy, like a Civil War graveyard in Charleston. Or we would play hooky from boring symposiums and rent a car and drive to the garden we both wanted to photograph. Or we’d phone each other on a few days notice and say, “Superbloom, California!” and fly out to meet and wander the Mojave Desert or Mount Figueroa in the Santa Ynez mountains to photograph poppies and lupines. That’s us below in April 2004, and below that, Ginny and me at the beautiful 2014 Quebec wedding of Ginny and her partner Claudine.

Cellphone cameras? Selfies? I secretly scoffed at tourists like these ones posing beneath the Statue of Liberty and resisted buying a cellphone of any kind until late 2017 when my family said I should have one for night-time driving emergencies.

Then my Samsung S8 became my easy travel camera for social media updating. And yes…. okay… selfies, too.  I joined the legions of ridiculous people, just like I said I wouldn’t.

But for my stock photo library of plants, I still need the higher resolution of my digital SLRs – and I spend much too much time at my desk late at night photo editing. It is truly a life immersed in photography and I am so happy to be there. Buried so deeply I may never be found.

And when I look at my rainbow array of flora, made especially to illustrate my paintbox garden concept, I do know Paul Simon had it exactly right way back in 1973.  We need “those nice bright colors”….

….. because “everything looks worse in black and white”.

KODACHROME (1973-There Goes Rhymin’ Simon – recorded at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, Alabama. Here’s a little background on the recording.)

When I think back
On all the crap I learned in high school
It’s a wonder
I can think at all
And though my lack of education
Hasn’t hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away

If you took all the girls I knew
When I was single
And brought ’em all together for one night
I know they’d never match
My sweet imagination
Everything looks worse in black and white

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph

So mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away

********

 

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Here is the entire #mysongscapes list up until the end of winter (and Covid)!

Joni Mitchell’s ‘Night in the City’;

Paul Simon’s ‘Kodachrome’ and my life in photography;

Vietnam and Songs of Protest;

Galway Bay and memories of my grandfather and Ireland;

Simon and Garfunkel’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme;

The John Denver lullaby I sang to my first grandchild, Today While the Blossoms Still Cling to the Vine.

Gordon Lightfoot for a Snow Day

Madame George by Van Morrison – my favourite song in the world

Brown Eyed Girl(s) – Van Morrison’s classic and my black-eyed susans

Raindrops – on flowers and in my gardens

Miss Rumphius and the Lupines

Bring me Little Water – on water in the garden

Amsterdam… Spring Sunshine – a Dutch travelogue and a brilliant Broadway play

Both Sides Now – a reflection on clouds and Joni Mitchell

Crimson & Clover and Other Legumes – a love letter to the pea family, Fabaceae

Mexico – James Taylor serenades in my travelogue of a decade of trips to Mexico

Crystal Blue Persuasion – blue flowers in the garden

My Bonny – remembering the late Laura Smith (and my dad)

Up on the Roof – a Carole King love-in and a lot of green roofs

Singing Malaika in the Serengeti

That Morning Sun – Melody Gardot (who?) and a song of optimism for these times!