Creature Discomforts 

Visitors to Peter Strain's gallery in Broome, Western Australia, typically react to his macro photographs of mangrove tree snails with laughter and amazement. These Creatures of the Giant Tides, as he has called the series, are startlingly colourful, varied and ˜alien'. 

For this shot of a coloured mangrove crab, Peter Strain predicted the trail it would take when he made a slight movement and it scurried back to its hole. 'I set up with red cliffs and a green mangrove tree as background, then ran a three-frame burst to get the picture,' he says. 'This was taken with a Sony Alpha 100 and an old Rokkor 50mm prime lens with adapters and extension tubes.'

 'They're the barroom scene out of Star Wars really,' says Strain, who was recently visited by the writers of a children's television series who have it in mind to use them as animated characters in a dream sequence.

The fingernail-sized snails (below) live on the tidal flats of Roebuck Bay, immediately south of Broome. Since discovering their bizarre visual appeal a few years ago, Strain has spent countless hours observing, selecting and photographing them. Or part of them. What most people anthropomorphically assume is their head popping out of their shell is in fact their foot.

'They spend some of the time under the water and some of the time out of it, on the mangrove trees,' says Strain. 'I pluck them off the branches when the tide goes out. Then I find a suitable background, use a wire frame to steady my hand while I hold them in front of my macro setup, and wait for them to pop their "heads" out. With the macro tubes, I need a terrific amount of light - bright sunlight - which brings out that intense colour.'

Roebuck Bay's huge tides aren't the only reason Strain has limited his shoots to a maximum of four hours at a time. 'It's a very hard environment to work in - sandflies, crocodiles and mud,' he says.

The mud has accounted for half a dozen lenses in recent years, which is why he buys 20- to 30-year-old Rokkors on eBay and uses a series of adaptors to attach them to his camera. 'My choice of equipment is about stuff I can afford to work with rather than what I have to spend time trying to protect,' he says, although he can't avoid having to be careful with his professional-grade Sony Alpha 900 cameras.

'Initially I used a Canon EOS 30D. Then Sony brought out the Alpha SLR range with antishake in the body. Other brands have antishake in the lenses, but having it in the body has made a big difference. I can shoot down to around a 40th of a second.' 

The snail shots have generated a lot of interest, and Strain will return to them in due time, but his current fascination is with the tidal flats' equally colourful crabs. 'Can we talk about crabs?' he says. 'It's a bit like being a musician. Everyone loves your old music, but you want to play your latest song.'

Making photographic music with the crabs presents a whole new set of challenges. 'If you get one good picture a week, you're doing well. There are millions of them, but they don't like humans at all. Their eyesight is better than ours and if they see a human, they vanish underground. You have to sit very quietly and wait for them to come out of their holes to feed. They always plan their escape route, so I have to ambush them when they scurry back. 

'There's no accidental photography with crabs. You have to learn about their behaviour - which applies to the tree snails as well. I don't do accidental photos. I think about the picture, then work out how I'm going to get there.' 

Stills and movies 

Strain grew up in the Cape Naturaliste area in southern WA and moved to Broome about 20 years ago. In the 1970s he started working in television while also getting into underwater stills photography with rigs he built himself and the Nikonos system.

While living in Broome, he has also managed the core creative team that developed the successful musical, Bran Nue Dae (recently made into a movie), and was producer and director of the first series of the TV comedy, The Mary G Show.

While continuing to take photographs for his own projects, and while running his studio/gallery/theatrette in Broome, he travels regularly by four-wheel-drive, boat and light aircraft to remote parts of the Kimberley coast to film for television, industrial and advertising projects.

'It's a personal point that stills and movie camera pictures sort of merge together for me,' he says. 'I do a lot of time lapse stuff, and it has taught me that stills cameras are really the same as movie cameras but with a slower frame rate and extremely high resolution. When I go out on a job, I'll take both kinds of camera and generate a lot of the TV material by shooting stills on a tripod and converting them to TV's 25 frames a second. For example, time lapses of the tide or people building a jetty.'

His nature photography has featured in Australian Geographic three times in the last 18 months: the snails, the crabs and the boab trees found only in the Kimberley region.

'One of the big keys in this photography for me is that most specimens in the wild are photographed by scientists for taxonomic reasons, to classify and count,' he says. 'If you've done any science studies, one of the things your lecturer will impress on you is that you have to avoid anthropomorphic [human] values and interpretations. But I go straight for the anthropomorphic. Initially I had a few scientist friends saying

shouldn't be doing that, but they changed their view when they saw the results.

'My point is that I think I can draw attention to the environment in a way that taxonomic photography can't. It encourages people to appreciate the animals we've got, particularly those in Roebuck Bay.'

A high-level government scientist Strain invited to his gallery ended up spending a fascinating hour there. 'He said to me, "As a scientist, you can spend all your life working out the numbers, how one species relates to another and that sort of thing.

But at some point you have to say you could do this all your life and never reach the end of it. You become in awe of nature. But what you do is jump straight to the awe." I thought that was really nice and we had a chuckle about it. I look at the snails and crabs as a sort of visual celebration and unashamedly go for it.'