Outdoor Photography

February 2018 Outdoor Photography 61

INSIDE TRACK

One of the best nuggets of non-photographic wisdom

I ever learned came to me at the top of a mountain in Africa.

It wasn’t, as you might suppose, a moment of existential

enlightenment handed down by a tribal elder. Nor did I

feel the triumph of Moses returning from the heights of

Sinai with his Tablets of Stone as I trudged back down the

mountain. Nonetheless, it was something of reverential

import that I have chosen never to forget. As the sun set

over the apricot-coloured expanse of Hartmann’s Valley,

Josh said to me in hushed tones: ‘you’ve got to respect your

gear. It’s easy to lose.’

I was a young photographer then, on one of my fi rst

magazine assignments. My travelling companion was a

vastly more experienced photographer in the travel genre,

who had won competitions and been published in the

likes of National Geographic. Although I probably got on

his nerves with my incessant questions – principal among

which was ‘what are you doing now and why?’ – Josh

was a patient teacher and was keen to impart his hard-

won knowledge of what made the world of the jobbing

photographer go around. ‘Losses and breakages eat into

your fee. You must extend the life of everything in your kit

to preserve your operating margins. The last thing you want

is to waste money replacing gear you already own.’

As darkness fell we descended the mountain along a

well-worn track over easy ground. Because we could see the

twinkling lights of home we made it back to camp without

incident and in plenty of time to slosh down a few pre-

dinner gin and tonics. As we reviewed our day’s catch on the

backs of our cameras, Josh let out a muted howl of irritation:

‘Damn and blast! I left my lens cap on top of the mountain.’

Quickly sensing how irksome it might be for the pupil

to draw attention to the failings of the master – especially

after the urgent sincerity of his ‘Sermon on the Mount’ –

I confi ned myself to nodding sympathetically. ‘Oh well,’ said

Josh, ‘nothing for it. We’ll have to go back up there and get it.’

The expression ‘are you serious?’ was welling up in my

interior ‘what to say next’ queue, but I could see that never

had a man been more serious in his life. Unable to come up

with any reasonable objection to his plan (beyond simply

not wanting to go), I set my alarm for 4am and put the

matter out of my mind as we went about our evening’s

entertainment, which consisted mainly of poring over

maps and GPS units, while discussing our route over the

gypsum plains of the Namib the following day.

The next day, dawn broke roughly two hours after we’d

left camp and only a moment or two before we reached the

summit of our small mountain for the second time in 12

hours. I’d been harbouring well-formed doubts that we’d

ever see Josh’s lens cap again, but much to my surprise it

was exactly where my photographer friend had predicted

it would be. He picked it up with a degree of satisfaction,

even though the entire enterprise was now expressing itself

as timetable slippage. By the time we had trudged down the

well-worn track our guide was busily honking the horn of

the Land Rover, swearing robustly in Afrikaans and with

a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp.

After several hours of rolling along parallel to a dry

riverbed in the scorching African sun, I summoned up

the courage to venture the opinion to Josh that perhaps

the eff ort of climbing the mountain once more had been

disproportionate to our goal: namely the retrieval of a

measly lens cap. ‘That would depend on how you look at

these things,’ replied Josh, before embarking on a lengthy

declamation on the nature of the intrinsic value of the

tools of the trade (which, on refl ection, amounted to

little more than ‘if you look after your gear, your gear

will look after you’.)

At the time, I though that he was doing little more than

covering up his embarrassment with homespun truisms, but

years later I can see that Josh had a point. If you have ever

mislaid a £10 or £20 note and spent an hour looking for it –

which I assume includes every one of us – you will see it too.

The fact of the matter is that the kit we have in our gadget

bags has taken time and money to accrue. We can’t help

natural wear and tear, and only the luckiest of us will get

through their career without having their equipment stolen,

but we can all reduce our losses due to lack of vigilance.

The tools of the photographer’s trade are frighteningly expensive, so we owe it to ourselves to

be vigilant with our gear. Nick Smith learned early on that not even the richest of us should

brush off the careless loss of a single lens cap as ‘the cost of doing business’

A lesson from the

top of the mountain

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