Imagine, if you will, that there’s a garden that you have long wanted to visit. It’s only open for a few days a year, and dear friends announce that they have secured tickets for a spring opening, and ask if you’d like to join them. You spend time excitedly deciding which camera to take, and which photographs you would like to capture, and you settle on your Canon EOS 5 film camera with 50mm 1.2 lens (Candido 200 film – a current favourite) and plan to capture dreamy shallow depth of field plant portraits.
You drive for 2 hours into the beautiful countryside of East Sussex, and as you enter the garden you are met by a stunning orchard meadow of bright blue Camassias, swaying in the gentle breeze and dappled shade of gnarled old apple trees. You take your camera from your bag, frame your first beautifully dreamy shot, press the shutter and…..
Nothing happens.
You have forgotten to put a battery in the camera.
Refusing to give in to disappointment and rage you pull on your big girl pants, take your iPhone from your pocket and pivot.
The photographs that I captured from that lovely afternoon at Perch Hill (the garden of Sarah Raven) were few and certainly not what I had planned; but in standing back and using my phone to capture the various areas of the garden I was forced to capture its essence, rather than its detail. My overriding impression of the garden that Sarah has created is one of abundance and exuberance; and I can’t help but feel that my iPhone snaps capture that better than I might have done had I remembered to put a new battery in my camera.
Every cloud and all that!