The Power of a Pinecone — A One-Shot Story

“Perfection is attained by slow degrees; it requires the hand of time.” — Voltaire

I fell in love with analog cameras before I became enamoured with the images that they can create. I’ve always been a sucker for mechanical things, from vintage Italian racing bikes to old military watches to Bakelite fountain pens. Thus, it is no surprise that I was eventually bit by the camera bug.

I’ll admit it, at first I was a poser with enough disposable income to be dangerous. It wasn’t that I was trying to impress people by strolling into a café with a black-paint beauty dangling from an artisanal strap. It’s just that I was more interested in handling, collecting, and curating antique cameras than I was in actually using these marvellous machines.

I wasn’t so far gone that I’d lock the cameras in a display case and stare at them from a rocking chair while stroking my beard. When I own a camera, I want to take it out, feel the leatherette against my fingers, fiddle with the buttons, and hear the satisfying swoosh-click of the shutter. In other words, I want to play with my thousand-dollar toys. I also want to know that they work. Even if I’m not very good at working them. So, if I’m out and about, I usually have a camera with me.

My son, Kipling, is still quite young and I often find myself having to kill time while he hangs out with his friends in local parks and playgrounds. Instead of sitting on a bench and scrolling through my smartphone, I use these opportunities to test my cameras. As you can imagine, the photographic results of these endeavours are typically a hodgepodge of under-exposed trees, wilting flowers, angry geese, cliché clouds, and blurry children. No matter how bad the pictures, I’m happy to be doing something creative and engaging with the people and environment around me.

About a year ago, Kip and I were walking in a small forest behind our home in London, Ontario. For about three hours, Kip busted around the woods, throwing sticks, digging up bugs, and disturbing the natural tranquility of the otherwise peaceful scene. Meanwhile, I took snapshots of him on TMax 400 using a Leica MP with a Summicron-M 50 f/2. By the end of the afternoon, I had burned through the entire roll and then dropped it off at my local studio before it closed.

When I downloaded the scans, one photo stood out from all the rest — a portrait of Kip holding two pinecones, one in each hand. Looking at it, I thought: Kip and I spent about 180 minutes in the forest that day. That is equivalent to 10,800 seconds. If you think of it in units of 1/1000th of a second, it can be further broken down into 10.8 million distinct instances. Out of all those instances, I believe I captured the single best one, the one that best imbued our time together that day.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that I had a profound experience when I saw Kipling and his pinecones on the black and white scan. It was seeing this image that caused me to cross the line from being someone who takes photos as an excuse to fondle analog cameras to someone who is compelled to take photos. To be honest, this change is in some ways less rewarding. Like an addict, I keep chasing after the feeling I got from that pinecone photo. Sometimes I find it, but these moments are few and far between. I can go through many rolls of film over weeks, or even months, before I even get close to it. I’ve even tried to recreate the image by getting Kip to hold other things, like apples or walnuts or tennis balls. But, of course, the outcome is contrived and unspontaneous.

So, there you have it. It wasn’t some early f/1.2 Noctilux or a black paint, push-button-rewind M2 that bewitched this pretentious Leica collector. It was a six-year-old boy and a pair of pinecones.

You can find more photos of Kip and his friends at Leica Fotografie International and my Instagram feed.

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