Lesson from a Favorite Old Image
“Chance favors the prepared mind.” — Louis Pasteur
I came across an old favorite the other day. I had been rummaging unsuccessfully for an image I needed — because the organization of my digital photo files is, you know, a work in progress. What I found instead reminded me of the role preparation and chance play in successful photography.
I shot this image a few years ago. Okay, it was more like twenty years ago. Ish. Back in the ancient days of film and better knees.
The photo of a honeybee hovering over a blossom reminded me of the Louis Pasteur aphorism invoked by lucky photographers — by which I mean every photographer at some point or another — that “chance favors the prepared mind.”
The camera was likely a Nikon N90 since that’s what I was shooting then. Based on a vague recollection — memory serves intermittently and incompletely — I’m pretty sure the lens was my old Nikkor 105mm f/2.8 AF Micro (which I still have). The image suggests that, too.
There I was, on my knees, contorted behind the camera mounted on a tripod with legs splayed wide to get the lowest angle possible. The tripod legs, not mine.
I don’t recall the location. California for sure, because that’s where I live and because, well, those are California Poppies, eschscholzia California, the state flower. Poppies were the subject of my photographic efforts that day.
The light was perhaps not ideal — bright daylight, maybe too contrasty. But that’s when the poppies open up. Through the viewfinder, I was “in” the scene, Zen-like, focusing, on the blossoms, literally, oblivious to anything else. Like bees.
Just like that, a bee flew into the scene. Instinct took over in a split second. You know, that experience when your body reacts before conscious thinking? My finger pressed the shutter button. Click. Click. Click. And the bee was gone.
I can’t recall the camera settings. Probably aperture mode and wide open, since I was shooting macro and looking for selective focus. The camera set the shutter speed.
Many of the photography “how-to” articles of the film era, before digital cameras and metadata, included detailed image data like aperture and shutter speed. I’ve heard that data was, let’s just say, less accurate than one might desire. Unless the photographer wrote it down every time or had an excellent memory. As Marcel Proust said, “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
I recall having that unexpected wow moment photographers feel after clicking the shutter when they realize what they have captured. Actually, that’s not true. In reality, it could only have been a feeling of optimistic anticipation of what I thought I had captured, what I should have gotten. Hopefully. Because, well, film.
Before digital and auto everything, film meant less than certainty at the moment of exposure that you got the shot. You would not know until after you got the processed film back. Many of today’s digital cameras allow unprecedented options and precision. Indeed, with these sophisticated fighter jes of photography, the you can precisely dial in exactly the wrong settings. It was so much easier to mess things up in the old days of film.
Curiosity and nostalgia compelled me to search out the original slide. I do so love a treasure hunt. Somewhat to my surprise, I found it relatively quickly. What did I dig up?
Turns out the image was shot in 2000. It was the last shot on a roll of 36, and the digital image that prompted this adventure was actually a cropped version. Here’s the original.
I like the intimate, pastel view in either one. I remember my initial reaction as I viewed the slide on the light table two decades ago. It as if I was an insect, perhaps another bee, traveling through the field of poppies, hovering over each blossom before moving on to the next. The cropped version gets rid of a few distracting elements.
When I look at this image, I don’t recall much about the shooting day as a whole, but the split second after that bee buzzed into my frame is pretty clear. The words of Ansel Adams are apt. “Sometimes I arrive just when God’s ready to have someone click the shutter.”
So, prepare. Learn your craft. When chance steps in, you will be prepared.
