About This Picture

Photographed in the outdoors, as I found it, with natural light. The tendril and leaf were backlit by direct sunlight, and there was a shady hillside in the background. The background is black because the difference in brightness between the sunlit tendril and the shady hillside was far more than the film could handle. It was very breezy, and the sunlight filtering through the leaves of a nearby tree was changing the light on the leaf and tendril constantly, while the leaf and tendril drifted in and way out of acceptable focus of my tripod-mounted, pre-focused camera. Over a 3.5 hour period, I photographed this as fast as I could every time the breeze briefly died down, getting 50 shots which each have different kinds of light falling on the subject.

There were several gargantuan passiflora vines growing near where I lived in Santa Cruz, California, and I passed by them every day. Each time I passed them, I would stop and look at dozens of new tendrils. I examined perhaps 10,000 tendrils over more than a two year period. While I did it for the purpose of starting and ending each day with beauty and wonder, not out of photographic self-assignment, I did also hope to eventually find a singular tendril that resonated with my artistic vision. I eventually found the one I was looking for: this one.

When I found it, it was less fully developed than you see here. I checked up on it every few hours until it fully grew into this shape. Also, it was slowly rotating on its vertical axis as it grew, and I waited until the rotation allowed for photographing the tendril with the background I wanted.

Nikon F100 camera, Nikon Provia 100F film, 300 mm lens, 1/2 life size.