Lives in contrast

Margaret Bake says Contrast was probably her last fling and she called on Derek Hughes to share it with her.
Contrast is the title of Margaret and Derek's photographic exhibition, which opens at the Percy Thomson Gallery on Friday.
Margaret uses analogue, Derek changed to digital. Both photographers have lived in Stratford, and have chosen to return for what could be Margaret's last public exhibition.
While Margaret's work spans 50 years in what she called her over-qualified one-eyed view, Derek's works were 25 years of an under-qualified promising beginning.
Margaret was born with sight in one eye only, which explains her one-eyed view descriptor only, not her sometimes-surreal work.
Her life was imbued with contrasts on what Margaret said, were the many different roads she has travelled.
Two-and-a-half years ago Margaret said she underwent a miracle where the failing sight in her right eye was restored in a bi-lateral graft.
She would be blind if it weren't for the skill of Professor Charles McGhee from Edinburgh who is the Maurice Paykell Professor of Opthamology at Auckland University Medical School.
"He was just extraordinary. It was a huge gamble to graft the cornea from my unsighted eye onto my failing eye." Margaret also received a donor cornea for her unsighted eye.
"I could see again, and the first things I saw were the daisies on the lawn."
It is no coincidence that a tryptych in the exhibition is of wildflowers and grasses and daisies.
Margaret began as a hobbyist photographer with a Coronet box camera given to her by her uncle.
She still has the negative of her brand new BAS bike that she took with the camera.
Margaret's father Herbert Whalley, who was with the Ministry of Works, transferred to Stratford during the war years from 1940-1953.
At the time Margaret was aged seven to 10 years, she would accompany her grandmother, who lived with the family, to visit her grandmother's friend, Gladys Keightley, a printer at TA McAllister Studio.
"I would stand in the darkroom and watch the photos going around in the lead lined sinks as Gladys developed the films."
Margaret started her career in 1958 at New Plymouth, with Charters and Guthrie Photographic Studio, after she applied for a job and won it over 20 applicants.
She went on to manage Camerland Studios in 1981 and then bought her own business, which she continued to work under her name, Margaret Bake Studios.
Her contemporaries said Margaret was innovative and pushed the boundaries.
"It was very important that you had a wide-angled view (of styles), to be a competent evaluator to make subjective judgements of other people's works. Photoraphy is a wonderful challenge and if you're not prepared to look at other photographers, you become narrow."
And for those who are considering a career in photography, Margaret cautions: "You have to be serious to truly service your clients, it's not for the faint-hearted."
Contrast Derek Hughes photography with his mechanical engineering degree from Canterbury University, and you could find flirtations of a technical kind.
He said the rules of photography did not exist for him, where Mother Nature inspired his photographic designs.
His instinctual eye for nature's designs has come through a long relationship on the land. Derek was one of the students at Stratford High who started the tramping club, and when he returned from the South Island, he worked at Croydon Nurseries in Stratford.
At the time his family lived 10 kms east of Midhirst. Derek was 10 years old when he had his first camera, a Brownie 127, and went to the motor racing at Paritutu.
They were the first photos he took as he pointed his camera, and followed the cars as they raced the circuit. He loved it.
Derek went off to Canterbury University and graduated with his engineering degree, and after 10 years returned to Taranaki for a break.
His mother was a friend of Biddy Barrett who wrote for The New Zealand Gardener, and she pushed Derek to submit his photographs of gardens to be published with her stories. Derek and Biddy have since published four books.
Derek said his photos were the last black and white to be published in the magazine.
"Photographing gardens are a pleasure, they are a big thing for me."
Derek and Margaret met through a working relationship. Derek processed and printed analogue film "Margaret brought film to me to be developed. One of the people working in the dark room accidentally tipped sepia ink onto the film."
Margaret doesn't remember the time, but Derek still has discomfort at the thought. Margaret had to re-shoot the film.
Derek said he killed his dark room this year, a sad event, but digital was more practical and profitable.
"I should have done it two years ago, but I was tied to it emotionally and traditionally."
The process of developing films also attracted local schoolchildren.
But digital has changed that, and changed Derek's approach to how he visualises his images in nature.