[Assam] First Prize Winner!

[Dilip/Dil Deka]

Guess who?  Chandan Mahanta had the best picture  in the Best Garden Photography category of the 2006 St. Louis Post-Dispatch Great Garden Contest.
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  Picture perfect
  By Becky Homan
  SPECIAL TO THE POST-DISPATCH
  08/12/2006
            
The pale-yellow flower of a native lotus (Nelumbo lutea) is a close-up photo by Chan Mahanta, first–place winner in the Best Garden Photography category of the 2006 St. Louis Post-Dispatch Great Garden Contest.
(Chan Mahanta)

How do you tell a plant to say "cheese?"

Here's how, metaphorically speaking. You look for the most beautiful, if subdued, daylight - early in the morning on what will be a sunny day, or anytime that high clouds make for bright-but-overcast weather. You find a flower or foliage or some scene that moves you to want its picture. And you come in close if your camera has a macro lens, or you step back with a longer lens and work on just the right composition for your image.

Winners in the Best Garden Photography category of the 2006 St. Louis Post-Dispatch Great Garden Contest did most of these things. And more. All are amateur photographers, by the way, but with gardening or photography among their favorite hobbies.

"Overall, the entries were impressive," says contest founder, horticulturist and judge Ken Miller. "Some people took pretty common subjects and made them special. Others took exotics and did the same."                       Advertisement
   



Chan Mahanta of the Old Jamestown neighborhood near Florissant did both. He came in first in this category.

His close-up image of the pale-yellow flower of a native lotus (Nelumbo lutea) is breathtaking - familiar and alien, all at the same time.

That photo, says another of the contest judges, horticulturist John Mareing, "is quite unique in that he has focused his camera on the very center of the lotus flower at the time of pollination.

"Mahanta's photo captures the contrast between the impressive developing pod and the delicate stamens surrounding it," Mareing continues. "The composition is interesting and artistic, and the photo exhibits great clarity and depth."

Mahanta, like the third-place winner in this category, Dave Bennett, had won prizes in other categories of previous Great Garden Contests. Mahanta placed first in Best Home Garden by an Amateur in 2004, and Bennett won third place for Best Flower Garden in 2003.

This wasn't a problem for the judges, who worked "blind" when reviewing the photos and learned of each previous winner's status after making their picks.     MORE
  SLIDESHOW: See photos of the winners gardens
  GROUP WINNERS: Together again
  EDIBLE WINNERS: Edible efforts win prizes in garden contest
  SERENITY WINNERS: Outdoor oasis
  PROFESSIONAL AID WINNERS: The 'wow' factor
  AMATUER WINNERS: From cottage to collections
  MORE CONTEST STORIES
  2006 Great Garden Contest winners
  Judges tell their own stories



"We don't have published rules regulating that," Ken Miller says. "We have an unofficial rule not to allow the same gardener to win two years in a row. These (2006 photo winners) already waited two years, and they've also gone into an entirely different field."

For Chan, photography grew out his father's love for the subject.

The elder Mahanta had dropped out of high school in the Assam state of British India in the eighth grade, Chan says. He went to learn commercial art and photography in Dacca, now the capital of Bangladesh. "He ended his career as a country photographer," Chan adds, when the prosperous tea trade waned near the end of British rule. But before that happened, Chan's father was a society photographer for both native and British society, "all of the 'Who's Who'," Chan says, "and he made a pretty decent living."

All of his photography was done without electricity, by the way, in a "lean-to" with a mirror reflecting sunlight through a small hole on the north side of the little building, for making exposures. "When I tell this to my friends in photography now," he adds, "they are mesmerized."

Chan's family was able to send him to the Indian Institute of Technology, where photography led him to study architecture. "Photography made a big impression on my life," Chan says. "It is the art of looking at things."

He didn't own a camera until 1971, a full year after immigrating to the states. It was then that he bought a single-lens reflex Canon. He still shoots with an updated version of that film camera but with newer Fuji Velvia film that, he says, produces beautiful color. "What I get with the digital camera can't quite match it, yet." All of his contest photos were shot on film.

Also a passion is the macro lens, designed to focus at very short distances for nearly life-size magnification. "If you go and frame something close up," he says, "all of a sudden a whole new world opens up, and you see things that most people miss."

The lotus photo is a prime example of that. But it isn't the first close-up lotus image that he's had published. He asks a visitor to wait a minute while he walks to another part of the airy house of his own design. (He practices architecture as Mahanta Associates, PC., Architects.) He returns with a copy of a Los Angeles Times magazine, dated 1976. On its cover is a Chan Mahanta lotus, photographed during his first years in this country. He was living in Pasadena at the time and met the magazine's editor. Exactly 30 years later, it is almost too much of a coincidence to see another of his lotus images on a cover.

"Lotus is my favorite plant," he explains, "all parts of it, the flowers, the leaves and the buds.

"But whenever I see something special," he adds, "I just go and shoot it."

Second-place winner Nancy Olson of Mehlville also has a fondness for close-up looks at her garden. "You don't have to be a wonderful gardener," she says, "to be attracted to the wonders in your yard."

Judges liked her beautifully lit blossoms of bleeding heart and her painterly image of a very common tomato plant. "Nancy turned tomatoes into art," says judge Miller. "Clearly, to her eye, vegetables rule."

"I kind of always have been attracted to photography," says the native St. Louisan, with a degree in English, two grown children, grandchildren and active church work that she shares with her husband, Jeff.

But in the fall of 1998, when Jeff's company transferred him to another city "temporarily" (two-and-a-half years), the two agreed that she would stay here. And with plenty of time on her hands, Olson says, she took a course in nature photography at the Missouri Botanical Garden.

It made a world of difference for her. "I totally fell in love with photography," she says.

Her family's old film camera eventually gave way to a new Nikon that uses film. Now, she also has a Nikon digital "that's just as fast as a film camera."

"If you're a serious photographer," Olson adds, "it's just so frustrating with the lag time in the shutter speed of some digitals." Half of her winning contest pictures were shot with film, half done digitally.

And like Chan Mahanta, she loves shooting "closer, and closer and closer. The farther in you go, there's another miracle and then another miracle - the exquisite nature of creation."

These discoveries led Olson, a freelance communications consultant, to develop a spiritual program for her church, titled "Celebrate the Light: Seeing the Creator in Your Photography." It's been so successful, she says, that she's been asked to give it to garden clubs, retirees and other groups that aren't necessarily religious.

"You have to be willing to shoot a lot," Nancy says she tells these folks, in the tips portion of her talk.

"But the first tip, no one wants to hear: Read your camera manual. These are extremely complicated instruments now."

She suggests "to simplify" an image as much as possible, to "look for soft light; you don't want harsh shadows," to use a tripod for the crispest images. And her film of choice is Kodak E100VS, 100-speed slide film. "That particular film makes colors pop."

But the subject matter is best left to someone else, or as she puts it, "giving credit to the artist who made this all.

"I didn't create this," she says, pulling out yet another artistic close-up of a bloom. "I put a frame around it."

Dave Bennett of St. Peters also never met a macro lens he didn't like.

His photo of the interior of a pink cactus dahlia couldn't be any more delicate or impressionistic. Likewise, the detail on yellow edges of a burgundy-colored daylily called 'Storm of the Century' draws you in and makes you want to see more of that tumultuous bloom.

"He is a romantic photographer," says contest judge Miller, "who captures great feeling with plants."

Bennett, too, loves most daylily images. "When they first open up in the morning," he says of the flowers that last only a day, "there's a sugary texture to the petals, and they're just so fresh. Once the sun hits these things, they quickly lose that look."

Bennett and his wife, Kathy, started gardening in 1996 on their hilly lot. They've added masses of flowering perennials around and behind a rear deck since then and plenty of little pathways from which to view these things.

Photography came hand in hand with their extensive yard work, especially to help guests see what's special there.

"When people walk through your yard," he says, "they don't get to see the pistils and stamens. I like close-up photography because these are things people never even notice."

Bennett mostly uses an older Nikon film camera with new lenses, and he works manually with aperture and shutter-speed settings. All of his winning images in the garden contest were shot on slide film.

He also nearly always uses a tripod.

And it's not unusual for him to get up at 4 a.m. to go shoot a full moon over the Gateway Arch, or, in winter, to capture a sunrise over ice floes at the Alton Dam. Nature, in all of its glory, is his muse. And he sells some of his pictures at a gallery and at two area garden centers.

His day job is the installation and service of elaborate aquariums for tropical fish. He doesn't spend much time shooting that subject.

The real thrill is "just to try to focus on the intricacy and delicacy of each flower.

"Getting a normal picture - like you see in a book or on a seed packet - doesn't add much of a personal touch."

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