ABOUT US
Marisa Smit
FRANCUA SMIT
MARISA SMIT
Growing up in the north west of South Africa on a farm, our creative expression found an outlet in making clay figurines from the dark clay found in the small creek near our house on the farm. Photography was something that the adults did when the family got together. Film was expensive and not something that we could explore.
Francua and I met when we were 15 years old. He has been my companion, my teacher and my motivation in learning new skills and trying things I had never considered before. He took me on my first camping trip, exposed me to snorkelling and introduced me to Botswana. He indulged my strange fancy to learn how to dive and took trips with me to places neither of us would have dreamt of on our own.
In my early teens, my parents bought me my first camera. I remember it being a flat camera that took a thin film that was not easily available. I took the camera everywhere and took as many photos as cost allowed. But it remained something I did when we went on holiday in Kwa-Zulu Natal or the Kruger Park. The one exception was when there was a train accident in our neighbouring town, Swartruggens. A train transporting diesel had derailed that led to a big fire. The day after the fire was extinguished, we drove to Swartruggens and I took some pictures of the devastation. I remember being touched by the loss that the families suffered and wanted so much to capture that on film. Neither I nor my camera was up to the task.
With the advent of digital photography, a digital camera seemed like the more cost-effective option and I graduated to a digital camera. I still didn’t have any technical knowledge and the camera was still just a tool to capture memories. It never dawned on me that if I had a camera with manual mode that I could do more to create what I wanted. You never know what you don’t know until someone exposes you to that which you don’t know.
Sometimes when I was capturing memories, there were moments or objects that was “different” and that I tried to capture. Francua has asked me what I mean with different, and it is very hard for me to explain. It is that something that makes you stop and think or feel. But these images were only my rudimentary experiments. Some of them worked and the intention was clear to others that saw the image, but others were completely lost as to what the message was.
As young professionals we also started traveling more and a new world opened to us. We snorkelled and fell in love with the world under the waves, we visited tropical areas and fell in love with the simplicity of a beach scene and lost our hearts in the diversity that is Botswana. These are special times that made a big impact on both of us.
During this time we decided that we wanted to upgrade our small point and shoot camera to a DSLR camera to enable us to try a few more things with our images. He is the technically inclined between the two of us. He studies and learns as much as possible about how things work and my approach is sometimes annoying to him. The first big trip with the new DSLR camera was a rainy season budget trip to the southern coast of Mauritius. Francua had read up on long exposures and I was quite content to take the small Nikon Coolpix to find images that speaks to me. Unfortunately, the Nikon DSLR that we took on that trip didn’t survive. But we got some really cool images before it fell!
Suddenly, images became a way that we can show others what we love and why we fell in love with something. It started to be a medium to tell stories and convey meanings to family and friends. Whether the meaning is an entire story or a single word or emotion. I was never a technical person; I very rarely remember technical jargon or settings. I tend to move aperture, shutter speed and ISO around until I get what I want. Photography was still just a hobby and something that was just for me.
In 2020, no one was allowed to travel. My creative side felt like it was dying and Francua wanted to help. He arranged for us to do a basic photography course with DPC. My soul sang with joy and I felt like I was coming alive. One of the questions that we were asked during this course was: “What do you want to do with your images?”.
I knew I loved nature and I wanted to share that love with others. I knew I wanted to embrace the artist that has been there all my life but that has taken a backseat to earning a living. But I still didn’t make the decision.
Early in 2021, we visited the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park and had an amazing time in Mabuasehube. During this trip we spent many hours with the Mabuasehube pride and saw the same curiousity in them as we exhibited towards them. One image that I absolutely fell in love with is one lioness on the edge of the pan in the long grass curiously looking at our car. This is the first image I printed and I fell in love with it even more after it was printed. It now hangs in our lounge at home – a constant reminder of the moment where a lioness and I shared a moment of reciprocal curiosity.
In the same year, we visited Moremi after an absence of nearly 3 years. While cruising along the river close to Khwai gate, a lioness and her sister were taking a late afternoon siesta. One perched on top of a termite mound. She lazily lifted her head and looked at us like we did not exist. This is the closest I have ever been to a lion and I was in absolute awe of her beauty and power. She was slightly higher than us and her raised position coupled with her lazy and completely detached bearing just emphasized her complete dominion over her environment.
The images shared here are those that truly speak to me and I hope that you will enjoy the journey with me.
FRANCUA SMIT
As a lot of people will tell you that found a real love for what they enjoy in life is that they did not go look for it and that it sort of just happened. Well, this is my story when it comes to photography. It sort of just happened.
As a child growing up on a farm, I found myself spending most of my time in the outdoors. I spent my energy mostly on sports and physical activities with the key word being outdoors.
My father was an outdoor lover too and I remember a lot of my early childhood holidays being bored in the back of the car spending hours upon hours looking for a lion kill or a majestic elephant in the Kruger national park.
I guess this is where my deep love for being in nature and the outdoors come from.
I was also not a very academic person substituting studying with something more physical, unless it was sort of a do or die situation passing grades.
Growing up I also was not much into arts or pursuing creative activities. Drawing even basic pictures normally ended up in disaster. During high school I did take a few piano lessons and our school did have photography as an elective subject, there were various other art classes too. I steered well clear of these somewhat strange people.
What I knew about art up to that time is that it is mostly paintings that were hung on the walls in our home for decorative purposes. We had a good collection of various paintings as the broader family did enjoy art to some extent.
Marisa and I met in high school and she always had a camera. Even way back I remember her having a very basic film camera that went everywhere with her.
Moving on a good decade or so we bought our first DSLR camera – also only because she wanted one. This was in our mid 20s and I really did not see the need to spend what little money we earned from our very young careers on something that was just going to lie in the cupboard.
When we settled down in our professional careers, we started to have the freedom to travel a bit more and we realised again how much we love being in nature. We ended up visiting places like Mauritius and the Maldives but our hearts truly found a place where it wanted to be the first time we visited Botswana.
By then we did indeed upgrade our camera and rented extra, more expensive lenses just to make it possible to try and capture the sort of images that was seen all over the internet.
We had no training on how to use it and most of the images was captured by trial and error. Marisa did however go for a very basic course that came with the Nikon that we had bought when we upgraded.
Even then I was not much into photography, I did most of the driving and she had the camera in hand. It was only when we swapped places for me to take a break from driving that I sort of had to take control of the camera.
On this trip while on a driving break I took one of my most sold images. Everything in that shot was almost perfect and I really did not have to do a lot to get it right.
Obviously at the time I did not realise what this image was and what it meant to me and for my career as a professional photographer.
A year or so later from the date of this photo I was yearning for an outlet to express myself. I had quit my job, a profession I did for more than 15 years and I found myself asking big questions.
Marisa and I enrolled in a formal Digital photography course and everything sort of fell into place.
This was something we both enjoyed and it was seen as an activity we enjoyed doing while we travelled. I started to play with the idea to do this more formally and perhaps a means to earn some extra income. We ended up doing course after course for the next year and I literally ended up spending the amount of a full days work every day reading up and studying everything pertaining to my interests in the various genres of photography.
When I was not studying, I was thinking about my philosophy as a photographer what made me different, what to me was important in pictures I saw on the internet. I studied pictures of various current photographers and of course pictures of the old masters of photography. All in effort to try find what I want out of my photos.
In my thoughts I remembered something of a family holiday to Europe. On this trip we visited the Vatican City. I ended up with a camera in my hand and my parents wanted me to take a picture of them in front of a statue – It did not really matter to me so I can’t remember the details. What is important is that I ended trying to position them correctly in the frame to get some sort of composition going – trying to tell a story with my photo.
It was extremely busy and people got sort of irritated with me not taking the photo and moving on, so did my parents. I ended up not taking the actual photo and left it there. I was 13 at the time.
I guess this is the point I want to achieve in my pictures. Perfection. Not for someone else but for me. I want to capture what I envision in my mind, working a scene until that one perfect shot presents itself.
Just like an old master working on a blank canvas. Putting an idea that I see in my mind into reality, working with light and shadow, creating mood and feeling. And the when I shoot colour; use colour theory to bind the viewer emotionally, drawing them into what I saw and felt. Putting them there, where I stood when I pressed the shutter button.