Jacarandas in Johannesburg

Pretoria is known as the Jacaranda City with more than 40,000 Jacarandas in the streets and parks. The Pretorians call October the Jacaranda Month and with good reason. Johannesburg is just as impressive, with the Jacarandas in full bloom a little bit later. On 4 November Xiaoyi and I took to the streets on an early morning photo shoot to capture the purple streets of Johannesburg.

Jacarandas are not native to South Africa but were introduced around the 1820's from Brazil.

I've been driving through the Jacaranda lined streets of Johannesburg for the past 20 years and occasionally stopped to take a photo, but yesterday we decided to go out early (trying to miss the traffic) and photograph the Jacaranda trees of Johannesburg.

As always, time flies when you have fun. We only managed to photograph 2 streets in Linden and 2 streets in Parkview before we hit that turning point with the sun being too high in the sky and the traffic becoming a problem.

Our first stop was on the corner of 1st Avenue and 6th Street where a Jacaranda tree and a Bougainvillaea create an arch inviting us into our photography outing. On Friday afternoon we were driving through 1st Avenue when Xioayi spotted this Bougainvillaea - this was actually what trigger this early morning photo shoot.

Xiaoyi spent the best part of 30 minutes at this scene trying to get the best composition including the Bougainvillaea and the street scene. I ended up tiptoeing underneath the Bougainvillaea while holding down a branch of the Bougainvillaea with my tripod to create a foreground element for her. (I hope she will give me credit as her assistant when she posts her photos on her website!)

From 6th Street, we turned left into 2nd Avenue and work down towards the City. We ended where we could include Johannesburg CBD on the horizon.

As always, I took my infrared camera along and photograph the Jacarandas also in infrared. The default colours with the 560nm filter created very vibrant blueish leaves with an amber sky. But the hues of the Jacarandas and that of the normal green foliage turned out to be too similar, so I decided that I like a monochrome conversion more, so I converted all the infrared photos to monochrome.

In Parkview we found a patch of blue Agapanthus on the sidewalk which complimented the purple Jacarandas very well. I wonder if the owner specifically planted the Agapanthus because they are in bloom at the same time as the Jacarandas.

I photographed them in colour and infrared using the same focal length to make a comparison between the normal and infrared light. For me, the fact that the green foliage and that flowers of the Agapanthus and Jacarandas reflect almost identical infrared made the infrared photos not as attractive as the normal colour version.

Here is a side by side comparison which shows how the impact created by the Agapanthus is actually lost when photographing in infrared.

Here follow a few more photos of our Jacaranda Photoshoot, hope you enjoy them

And two more of the Infrared photos: