Longwood Gardens By Naveen Agnihotri

In September 1999, my cousin Sanjay and his wife Sangita kindly invited me to come to Longwood Gardens with them. Longwood Gardens, in Kennett Square PA, were created by the DuPont family, and are sometimes also called DuPont Gardens.

I had recently acquired a 1970s Canonet GIII rangefinder camera, and was eager to try it out, and see how it compared to my existing Minolta 7SII (also a rangefinder from the 70s). So I went with them, both cameras around my neck, looking like a total geek. That was also the only time in my life when I actually took careful notes about which pictures were taken with what camera, with what aperture setting, etc.

The result of my comparison: both cameras took equally good pictures, with very to choose between them. (The film used was Fuji Velvia in both cases). However, I found the Canonet easier to focus because of its larger rangefinder window. On the other hand, the Minolta is smaller and lighter, so there you go.

During the course of the day, two people came up to me and asked me what cameras I had. Both these people also had more than one camera on them. Nerds of a single feather stick together.

Most of these photos are fairly bad, but I keep them here as a reminder about the bad old days, as I become an older and wiser photographer.

In both the photos on the left and right, the photographic objective fell flat on its face. In the one on the left, I was trying to photograph a butterfly with a normal lens. Nowadays I wouldn't even bother, but in those days I was young and impressionable, so didn't know any better. After seeing the dismal results, all I could do was posterize them in gimp and now it passes off as low-quality art. Ditto for the wall on the right, where I was trying to capture the texture of a wall.

Of all the pictures I took that day, this one below of the water lilies is my favourite. The original slide for this is stunning. But the magic of the slide got lost in scanning, and no amount of post-scanning manipulation can bring it back.

More random photos:

And here are a couple of photos of the Sanju and Sangita themselves. Sangita is paranoid that now that her picture in on the web, some pathetic random loser in another part of the world will download it and do who-knows-what with it. So if you are a pathetic random loser, please don't download her picture. Or if you do, please treat it with the utmost respect. If you don't, I will personally break your legs.