Bengy Toda and those hills like green elephants

I just had to tell photographer Benigno “Bengy” Toda III — with white beard and burly hunter-like physique — that he reminds me of Ernest Hemingway. With all his adventures as a sportsman, hunter and photographer, did he ever get the desire to write his own memoirs?

I submit for your perusal how “Hemingwayesque” Bengy Toda’s life is.

The man has played professional polo in Manila, the US, Argentina, Spain and England, becoming friends with Prince Charles and even meeting the Queen of England along the way. (“They are very nice people,” he recalls.) He has gone fishing in places such as the Great Barrier Reef, Hawaii and Mexico; motorcycling across the nation as well as in Morocco, New Zealand, and Tasmania; car- and boat-racing in Florida; skiing in Colorado; hang-gliding in Italy; and, get this, game-hunting in Africa. The biggest animal he ever hunted was an elephant back in the ’80s. (“But I’m an environmentalist now,” he stresses. “I love animals, I love nature.”)

One time, Toda was stranded in Alaska during particularly harsh weather. Their plane was frozen, could not land. He remembers, “We were there for two weeks, we were 12 people. So the pilot got all of us in a Cessna, patong-patong. I was the smallest; I was in the bottom.” If the plane had a particularly bumpy landing, he would’ve been dead right then and there. “The plane took a long time to take off, tumatama sa mga branches. When we landed safely I got drunk for three days dahil sa takot. I was just 20 years old.”

But through all those experiences, Toda never stopped taking photos. There were memorable trips to the North Pole and other exotic locales… and the photographs, he will be quick to tell you, are his own memoirs.

For his exhibit at Manila Contemporary, Bengy Toda says, “I want to show people my love for the outdoors. I want to show what people do not see.” Photo by MANNY MARCELO

“All my life I’ve dabbled in photography,” he says. Bengy’s mother, Rose Marie, was a photographer herself, an inspiration. She gave him a Kodak Brownie when he was five years old. When he turned nine, he got his first Hasselblad camera. Then he traded for a Pentax 6x7. In college, he minored in Photography in San Francisco, California, assisting grizzled veterans of the lens.

His love affair with landscape photography blossomed even more when he was invited by high-end Danish camera brand Phase One three years ago to take photographs of the Australian outback and its off-the-beaten-path beauty. 

“You go to very interesting places, (the people behind the brand) give you the cameras, and you get instructions from famous photographers,” he explains. Toda points at one photograph framed under glass in his Studio 58 Lab 10 office in Pasong Tamo featuring a stream, some rocks, and a graceful a slither of light. It’s not unlike an Impressionist painting.

He expounds, “That was taken in the Australian desert when there was water at five in the morning — if you tell me to go back there I wouldn’t know how. That picture won an award during the Phase One course that I took.”   

Toda also shows an aerial photo taken with an infrared filter. The weather was bad that day, so the photographer wanted to focus on the clouds on top of the dead canyons. Another beauty.

So, you could still consider Bengy Toda as a huntsman: walking the grasslands, ever hunting for that one perfect shot with his trusty camera.

The mountain-chaser and other tales

“I want to show people my love for the outdoors. I want to show what people do not see,” he explains about his first exhibition titled “Chasing Mountains,” which opens on Oct. 20 at Manila Contemporary gallery.

For the show, the lensman decided to focus on the drama and the panorama of places across the Philippines such as Mt. Mayon with its poetically perfect peak, the fabled rice terraces of Banaue, and the mountains up North in Batad, Mayoyao and Hingyon. 

“I shoot digital the way I shoot film. I don’t take 150 shots of one place; I take three photos and that’s it. I told my daughter, who’s an aspiring photographer, to learn taking pictures with film first. The training you get is invaluable.”  

Bengy talks about his gear: “I shoot with two kinds of cameras — a Phase One with a digital back and then transfer it to an Alpa with large format lenses.”

The photos are printed on Fuji Flex, which is extremely glossy. And the colors are realistic (never too saturated or contrasted) and look splendidly alive… almost jumping out of the frames. Toda can print his photographs in enormous dimensions (they can measure up to 45 x 150 inches) because they range in picture quality from 60 to 80 megapixels, and are face-mounted on acrylic glass in a patented process called Diasec.

All done in his Studio 58 lab that specializes in printing for exhibits, billboards, and marketing displays, among others.

His Mayon Volcano is a panorama of three pictures shot with a 30-millimeter lens and digitally stitched. “I wanted to show Mayon at its best. Whenever I take pictures of mountains, I give them justice.”

His describes his strategy thusly: “What I’m showing in this exhibition is what I can print, how big I can print, and the closeness to the beauty of what I can take.”

Printing the photographs was just half the battle. The photographer had to set out on foot and camp out just to get his dream shots.

Toda recounts, “The people in Albay and my photographer-friends told me I was crazy. Nakatakip daw ang Mayon since there was a storm coming. When we got there at three in the morning, the guard at the park told us that our vehicles were not allowed to pass. So we had to walk, carrying (all these pieces of) equipment. We ran. When we got there, in all dismay I found out there were wires, which I had to digitally remove afterwards. You have to give reverence to the mountain.” 

The photographer went to great lengths just to get an image.

In one body of water, he almost got swept by the current into a cascading waterfall. In the Mountain Province, it was 10 days of rough life. They generally ate whatever they could and washed it down with Kangen alkaline water. They had to climb two or three mountains just to get to one village. One trip took them nine hours just to get to a specific area, following a trail that was hardly used. Slippery as shit.

“It was harrowing. When we got down, it was all pilapil. We had to wade through. We were tired, hungry and we wanted to just lie down. But I was able to take a beautiful panoramic shot of Batad — the valleys, the villages.”

With all the hardships he encountered with landscape photography, did he ever think of exploring other genres? Portraiture, perhaps?

“I don’t enjoy shooting portraits,” the man shrugs. “That would be a cold day in hell.”

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“Chasing Mountains: Photography by Bengy Toda” opens on Oct. 20, 6 p.m., at Manila Contemporary, Whitespace, 2314 Chino Roces Ave. Ext., (formerly Pasong Tamo Ext.), Brgy. Magallanes, Makati City. The show is on view until Nov. 11. For information, visit www.manilacontemporary.com.