My Camera Bag Lives in the Boot and My Phone Runs the Whole Day

The boot is my office

People imagine my job as the ten minutes where I lift a camera and a bride laughs at something her father says. That part is real, and I love it, but it is maybe two percent of the week. The rest is driving. My camera bag lives in the boot of my car, wedged against a cooler box and a folding reflector that has never once folded the way the instructions promised, and I spend more hours behind a steering wheel than behind a lens. I shoot weddings and portraits, mostly around KwaZulu-Natal, sometimes up into the Free State when a couple has a farm in the family, and I go where the work is because a solo business cannot afford to be picky about postcodes.

Three days a week, sometimes four in the busy months, I am on the road before the sun is properly up. I have learned the rhythm of it. Fill the tank the night before. Charge everything. Pack the bag by the front door so I do not stand in the kitchen at half past four trying to remember whether I put the spare batteries in. And check the phone, because on a shoot day the phone is not a phone. It is the map to a venue I have never seen, it is the shot-list the couple and I built together over coffee weeks earlier, it is the thing I tether my laptop to when the venue has no signal and the gallery has to start uploading. It runs the whole day. If it dies, the day gets very hard, very fast.

The dirt road to a farm I could not find

The worst version of that happened on a Saturday in the Midlands. The wedding was at a farm that did not really have an address, just a pin someone had dropped and a note that said turn at the second cattle grid after the church. I was following the directions on my screen down a dirt road that had clearly not seen a grader since the previous government, corrugations rattling everything loose, and my phone was propped in the cup holder because that was the only place I had for it.

Every time I hit a bump it would shift. Then on one particularly vicious ridge it jumped clean out and slid down into the footwell on the passenger side, screen down, still talking to me in that calm voice about turning left in four hundred metres while I could see nothing. I could not reach it. I would not take my eyes off that road to grope around under the seat, because the road had a ditch on one side and a fence on the other and I had already met one very unbothered cow. So I drove blind, missed the turn, ended up at a locked gate that belonged to someone else entirely, and had to reverse a long way to a spot wide enough to turn around. I arrived at the wedding with my heart going and about eleven minutes to spare before the bride was ready. Eleven minutes. I did the getting-ready photographs with my hands still not quite steady.

That evening, sitting in the car park while the reception carried on inside, I decided I was done letting the phone live loose. I looked properly at Car Phone Holders and picked something that clamped onto a vent and actually held, so the screen sits at eye level near the windscreen and does not go anywhere when the road turns ugly. It sounds like nothing. It changed my driving completely. I can glance at the next turn and put my eyes straight back on the road, and the phone stays exactly where I put it whether the surface is smooth tar or a farm track that hates my suspension.

The cable that died on the Van Reenen climb

The charging problem was slower to reveal itself, the way slow problems always are. For a long time I ran one cable in the car, a thin thing that came free with something years ago, and it did the job well enough that I never thought about it. Then it started doing the job only when it felt like it. I would plug the phone in at the start of a long drive, watch the little lightning bolt appear, feel reassured, and then two hours later discover the battery had actually gone down, not up, because the connection had quietly given out somewhere around the point where the outer sleeve had frayed and split near the plug.

It reached its final indignity on the long pull up Van Reenen's Pass, that endless truck-heavy climb where the last thing you want is a dying phone with your whole day's navigation on it. I was heading to an engagement shoot on the other side, running behind because of roadworks, and I kept lifting the cable and wiggling it at the traffic lights, that hopeful jiggle everyone does, and getting nothing. The copper inside had simply given up. I arrived with the phone on four percent and had to shoot the first half of that session rationing my screen like water in a drought, checking the shot-list only when I truly needed to.

I replaced it that week, properly this time, buying a couple of decent Cables so there was always a good one in the car and a spare in the bag, and I threw the frayed one in the bin with more feeling than a cable really deserves. It is a small, unglamorous purchase. Nobody photographs their cables for the gram. But a cable that carries current every single time is the difference between a calm drive and a stomach-clenched one, and I had learned that the expensive way.

Sorting the charging out for good

The cable fixed the frayed-wire betrayals, but the deeper issue was that my charging in the car had always been an afterthought bodged together from whatever I had, and afterthoughts do not survive a working week. On a shoot day the phone is under constant load. Navigation running the whole drive burns through a battery fast, the screen bright against the morning glare, and I would arrive at venues already worried about how much charge I had left for the actual job.

So I did the sensible thing I had been putting off and set up proper charging that lived permanently in the car, sorting out reliable MagSafe Chargers so the phone tops up steadily while it sits in the holder navigating, instead of me plugging and unplugging and hoping. Now the phone charges while it works, held where I can see it, doing its three or four jobs at once without me thinking about any of them. That is really the whole point. I did not want to think about it. I wanted to think about light, and about whether the couple was relaxing, and about the drive home.

What the road actually teaches you

I tell newer photographers who ask me for advice that the camera is the easy part. You will learn the camera. What nobody warns you about is that a one-woman business on the road is really a hundred tiny systems that have to hold, and each one you have not sorted yet is a small ambush waiting for the worst possible day. The phone sliding into the footwell on a dirt road. The cable dying on a mountain pass. The battery flat when you needed the map most. None of these are dramatic. All of them can wreck a booking you cannot get back, because a wedding happens once and there is no reshoot.

What I have slowly built is a car that lets me do my job. The bag in the boot, the holder gripping the vent, a good cable that works every time, the phone charging while it guides me down some road I have never driven to some venue I have never seen. It is not exciting to describe. But I drive to those farms and those beaches and those stiff little town halls with a lot less dread than I used to, and I arrive with something left in the tank, mine and the phone's both. That calm is worth more to me than any lens. The couple never sees the drive. They only see me walk in steady, on time, ready. That is the version of me the whole boot exists to deliver.