Macro-Photographer Neil Bromhall and the Fascinating Life of Plants

By Sarv Taghavian

For British photographer Neil Bromhall, an interest in nature macro-photography was part genetic (his father, Dr. Derek Bromhall was a marine biologist and a wildlife filmmaker for the BBC) and part accident. Literally.

After finding a way to combine his two passions – wildlife and photography – by assisting Dr. Bromhall on his films, Neil Bromhall branched out on his own, freelancing as a wildlife filmmaker. He had just finished shooting a piece on dolphins and was about to embark on a trip to film gorillas in the Congo when he was waylaid by an accident that broke both his legs and his right arm.

Unable to travel, he instead built a studio on his own property. "I was fascinated in what was a new technique at the time, in the 90s, called time-lapse. This was just when the BBC – unbeknownst to me – was making a series called The Private Life of Plants. "

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Bromhall met with BBC executives who were interested in his experimentations with time-lapse. They gave him some test assignments. "Fortunately," he recalls, "they liked the two that I did and I ended up working with them for a year and a half."

His work on The Private Life of Plants, in fact, garnered him an Emmy and a working relationship with the BBC that lasted for 16 years.

Bromhall's time-lapse work requires patience and a great deal of experimentation with equipment and timing. To film butterflies emerging, Bromhall discovered that there wasn't a studio flash capable of firing the quick succession of flashes needed to get the action without creating a flicker in the sequence. But when he brought in a studio tungsten light to give the scene even, continuous lighting, the heat it emitted dried out the butterflies themselves. To compensate, he would infuse the space with moisture, creating very high humidity. Bromhall explains that he's been "blessed with a patience for wildlife." He has to be, considering he's discovered that these particular Heliconius butterflies like to emerge at three in the morning.

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To capture most of his time-lapses, Bromhall has a custom-built studio – approximately nine feet tall, 18 feet wide and 24 meters long –- at the end of his garden. The brick building has no windows. He refers to the space as "a concrete block." This design allows the photographer total control over the lighting as well as temperature and humidity.

For most of his plant-based photography, Bromhall says, "I film in total darkness except for my grow lights where I can control the 'day' length." Grow lights are modified mercury halide lights that, as their name implies, are used in nurseries for plant growth. Bromhall then uses studio flash and mirrors to bounce light. "I have a time-lapse control unit which acts as an intervalometer, it also draws a blind under the grow light so I expose with only flash," he says. The studio has been sectioned off with curtains so that, at any given time, he can have two to three "sets" going at once without the flashes from one disrupting the others.

He uses Nikon D200s and D300s to capture his images. He said he was waiting for Nikon's digital cameras specifically because he wanted to use his Micro-Nikkor macro lenses.

Bromhall describes the video above, depicting the Fly Agaric toadstool as it grows underneath a silver birch, as one of his personal favorites.

"I find plants fascinating," Bromhall says. "They use insects, winds, animals to disperse their seeds and to pollinate which is really quite clever when you think about it. The acorn that I filmed [found below] is actually buried by a jay. The bird puts it in the ground as though in a larder but quite often they forget where they put it, and the acorn can grow away from its mother. And then that's what I film, the acorn taking root."

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Asked about the allure of his time-lapse videos, Bromhall says, "You bring their time into our timescale. You don't sit around watching a flower bloom in weeks or months but [the time-lapse] is revealing a plant's life that you don't normally see. I find that fascinating."

When not on assignment, Bromhall creates his time-lapse videos for his YouTube channel and for his website, www.rightplants4me.co.uk, which is a database designed to tell people which plants are most appropriate for their soil and environment.