How Johann Espiritu’s daughter taught him how to take pictures

Johann Espiritu first saw his daughter not with his own eyes but through the lens of a camera. He was in the delivery room with his wife Marga and when the doctor said the baby was coming out, he took his camera out and waited. And the instant that she did, he began shooting like mad.

He hasn’t stopped since. Four years later, Johann has shot about 8,000 pictures of his daughter; in their house are about 40 photo albums – all of them hers. He has also shot thousands of pictures of whale sharks, sunsets, sunrises, old churches, flowers, cacti, pets, parks, people, beaches and children – but he tells people that his favorite subject is Rocio, the little girl who calls him dad.

"I never took any photography classes," he says. "I like to say that Rocio taught me how to take pictures. My daughter was born in 1998 and from the second she was born, literally, there was an explosion of pictures."

In the delivery room, he exposed one roll of film. Today, on the average, he uses one to two rolls a week on his daughter. This is probably not very unusual for parents who like to record every smile, every step, every new growth of hair on their child’s head – but 8,000 pictures? And she’s just four years old!

Johann is not a professional photographer in the sense that this isn’t his bread and butter. Rather, he describes himself as a serious "photography hobbyist" (but he has done commercial work) and he likes to keep it that way. "I like having the luxury of saying no if I don’t feel like taking a picture today or if I don’t want to take someone’s picture. I enjoy being able to shoot only what I want."

His day jobs are very academic (and also creative, contrary to popular opinion, he insists). Johann is a lawyer with the energy and infrastructure group of the firm Romulo, Mabanta, Buenaventura, Sayoc and De los Angeles; he’s also a professor of information and technology law at the Ateneo Law School. But Johann is on a one-year leave from work to pursue his master of laws at Georgetown University in Washington.

Johann’s fascination with photography started when he was a kid. His father, banker Octavio "OV" Espiritu, was a hobbyist as well and owned a Canon A1, which Johann was not allowed to use and so naturally he was dying to touch it.

"I was seven years old. I thought there was nothing cooler than my dad’s Canon," he says with a laugh.

His mom Marilen Espiritu paints, which influenced him back in his teens when he dabbled in watercolor. It was when he was a law student at the Ateneo that he got into photography. One Christmas, he bought himself a gift: an entry-level Canon EOS, a semi idiot-proof camera. You can say he hasn’t stopped buying cameras since.

"I’m a collector," he admits with a sheepish grin. He has seven SLRs, three range-finder cameras, two medium-format cameras, some compact cameras and digital cameras. He also has the old pieces, circa 1961, the old type where you have to look through the viewfinder from the top of the camera.

One of his most prized cameras is the one he bought two years ago: A Canon A1, just like the one his father had. "It’s really low-tech compared to today’s standards but I have this sort of attachment to it."

So even before Johann packed his stuff for his year-long stay in Washington (he leaves tomorrow), he had already packed his cameras – removed their batteries, cleaned them and stored them – except one, which he’ll be bringing along with a newly acquired digital camera ("it would be a sin for me to take my daughter to Disneyland and not record it in video").

Having done that, Johann said goodbye to his cameras. "It was a very emotional moment for me," he chuckles.

We aren’t entirely sure if he’s kidding.

Looking at Johann’s pictures, you’ll feel that he has an affinity for nature. He takes the most glorious sunsets and seas. One of the best for me is a photo showing the smooth white canvas of a beach umbrella, albeit frayed at the edges, against the background of dark, rough waters. It’s not only that he’s able to bring out contrasting textures, but his photos also display movement and emotions. They’re not static, they’re not only pictures. They’re stories.

Another photo shows an iron gate leading to the bell tower of an old church in Pila. There is a burst of light behind the gate, like God himself is about to enter and you’re twittering in your boots in anticipation.

A sunset photo taken in Donsol, Sorsogon, shows the silhouettes of people walking along a sandbar, an almost leafless tree and a smaller bush. It looks like an old photo because the horizon has a dull golden glow and the photo like something you leave between the pages of a book and then forget for decades.

Johann took this photo while he was riding a moving banca and had only several seconds to shoot it. With his five-pound camera pressed to his face, "the hardest part was trying to get the horizon totally straight."

He also has a series of photos of the whale sharks in Donsol. "It’s a fish as big as a bus. Literally. You jump into the water and you see this big gray fish. It just swoops past you and you’re like, Oh my God. We happened to catch the tailend of this year’s season and we were lucky because in two hours we had 13 sightings. It’s so big that the widest angle lens I had was 35-mm and I couldn’t get the whole thing. I would have needed a 20-mm lens."

Johann loves nature due in no small part to his wife Marga, who is with the World Wildlife Fund. "She’s a nature lover and both of us dive. Besides, there are so many beautiful things to shoot."

Johann says there’s a certain romance in taking pictures with an SLR camera (which uses film) as opposed to using a digital camera. "You have this roll of film, it winds to the next frame. You expose it and it gathers light and then the shutter closes and that’s it. You pull the negative out and you develop it and you’re holding this little image of what you took. There’s something romantic about the process that I can’t let go off."

Having said that, Johann admits that 80 to 90 percent of the time, he shoots with a digital camera. He sometimes plans trips out of town for the sole purpose of taking pictures. In Boracay with its romantic seascape; in Laguna and Intramuros, where he photographed old Spanish churches; in Baguio, where he took pictures of butterflies and flowering cacti, the latter for his friend Kevin Belmonte’s column "Succulentophile" in Modern Living, the Philippine STAR’s Saturday Lifestyle section; in Batangas where he took photos of an archeological dig.

"I like to find a photograph wherever I can," says Johann.

In Baguio, he was just walking around when he saw some ladies selling plants. He called up the Philstar CEO and asked him if he wanted photos of the cacti. "Normally I go to Kevin’s house and bring this bunch of lights with me and set up a mini studio in his den. Everything is controlled. In Baguio, I just had a camera, no flash, one lens, I didn’t have a tripod and I had to use bond paper as a reflector. It turned out probably to be the best series I shot for Kevin."

Johann is right, of course, when he says that taking the perfect picture can either be produced by years of training and experience, or by pure chance. When I interviewed photographer Neal Oshima some years ago, he described that kind of picture as "being granted a moment of grace when nothing can go wrong and it has nothing to do with you."

Says Johann, "You can take a picture of something as mundane as a door, the front of a banca. Given the right time, place, and a sort of perspective, it can be beautiful."

His experiences have shown him that sometimes, a good picture is not only waiting to happen, but is already happening and just waiting to be discovered – like in one’s backyard, for instance. Johann took a picture of a tree while the family gardener was burning leaves. The result is an image that looks so ethereal and lush one wonders whether he took it in some mystical rainfortest.

"Experience teaches your eye what’s good, what’s not good, how to make something that doesn’t look good look better," he says. "It’s a challenge to sometimes see something beautiful in the ordinary."

Johann travels all over the country in search of people and things to photograph. So when he goes out of town, how many cameras does this collector bring?

"Three or four."

And how many pairs of pants?

Johann laughs. "Let’s just say I carry more camera equipment than clothes."

He describes a recent weekend where he took about 200 pictures and he was happy with only two. "For me, that’s a lot. If I like one that I’m really happy with, who cares about the other hundred that you hate?"

That’s the thing he loves best about photography. "A photographer can’t cheat, unlike in painting where you can make somebody look different. In a lot of ways, it is testament that life is beautiful. You take a picture, it’s just you, me and the lens in between. I’m capturing what the camera sees."

Yet he also agrees with the notion that two photographers can take pictures of one subject and come up with two totally different photos. "It’s like everybody experiencing life in a different way."

Did we tell you that Johann is also into high-tech gadgets? "I’m a big sucker for technology," he says. "I love computers, all these little things you can play with, technological wonders that you can fit in your palm."

Some of his pictures he manipulates on the computer, like his favorite one: A picture of a young boy in Luneta looking at balloons dancing in the air. Everything is in sepia except for the boy and the balloons. It’s like Johann has captured a world from the boy’s perspective.

So what do his pictures say about Johann? No, no, not about him per se, he says – about the world in general.

"That life is beautiful."

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To see more of Johann’s photos, catch the ongoing group exhibit of DPX, a group of professional and amateur photographers, at Flute restaurant on LP Leviste St., Salcedo Village, Makati, until June 30. Or log on to Johann Espiritu’s website at www.photos.ph/gadgetguy.

E-mail the author at tanyalara@yahoo.com