Picture perfect
Amateur shutterbug Henrietta Walmark explains how she stopped being so camera-shy taking pictures with her iPhone after falling in with a group of pros
Last Christmas, friends from an informal group of early-rising photographers in the Beach gave my partner Erwin Buck and me personalized gingerbread men to hang on our tree. Under Erwin’s name was a simple outline in icing of his SLR camera. Under mine was an iPhone, an in-jokey reference to how I can hold my own shooting with my smartphone in the company of pros using “real” cameras.
It all started six years ago, when I began a daily walk along the waterfront in our east end neighbourhood. I soon joined a collection of runners, dog walkers, birders, yogis, cold-water dippers, sightseers and other striders and strollers who couldn’t resist raising their cameras and phones to snap photos of the sunrise. And I fell in love with taking pictures.
I gradually came to know many of the casual shooters — sharing Instagram handles, wildlife sightings and warnings about dive-bombing blackbirds — but it took longer to get comfortable around the pros.
When I first met Erwin later that year, he wanted to know why I held my iPhone vertically rather than horizontally when shooting. I laughed and told him I was posting to Instagram — which only accepted square images at the time — so my phone’s orientation didn’t matter.
I asked him a few weeks later why he and the other guys with their big lenses all shot the same thing: the Leuty Lifeguard Station.
That’s when he told me about the annual Beach calendar he produces, and about the friendly rivalry he has with several retired Toronto Star photographers who post on Facebook their best sunrise pictures of the day. And there I was, capturing abstract shoreline details, ancient willows and my shadow.
My initial bravado quickly disappeared when he introduced me to this Beach posse of former Star photographers David Cooper and Dick Loek one morning. I mostly kept my iPhone in my pocket when I first walked with them, since it is no match for Cooper’s Fujifilm XT4 and Loek and Erwin’s mirrorless Nikons Z7s. Their images will always be crisper than mine. They can pick off close-ups that are out of reach for me, and play with depth of field and focus in ways I can’t.
After a lifetime as photojournalists, both Loek and Cooper still enjoy shooting and have a playful rapport. Loek encourages me when I hang back. Cooper lets me know when my composition or editing skills are subpar.
They send people to my Instagram page and tell me when they love an image. Their occasional comments, such as “You win,” make my day. As does Erwin’s “Where was I when you took that?” I reply they were busy all taking the same photo of the sunrise, again.
Their long-running gag about me is, thank goodness she doesn’t have a real camera or she’d really show us up.
That teasing helped give me the confidence to trust my instincts. To turn around to see where the light is falling when everyone else points their lenses toward the sun. To lean into my weirdness — like capturing a translucent plastic bag billowing inside a wire-mesh trash bin or a snail on a dewy sun-drenched pane of glass. To make images that, even if technically imperfect, capture the feeling of a fleeting moment. And to keep playing and experimenting with a camera I can use unobtrusively and carry anywhere, at any time.
A year ago, Cooper got a lens ball as a gift. He wasn’t sure what to do with the clear glass sphere you shoot through to create fisheye images. Loek suggested he lend it to me to see what I would come up with. I’m not sure who was more surprised — the two of them or me — with the pictures I captured.
There’s a saying that goes “The best camera is the one you have with you.”
For now, I’ll keep using my iPhone.