Happy Chistmas

A happy Christmas to all. I hope that you have a wonderful time with friends and family and that the New Year brings plenty of photographic oppotunities and some great images!

Just Do IT

"Are you really sure you want to go for it", the voice asks querulously over the phone. It's raining outside, and dark. The weather forecast for the following morning is equally bleak. 'IT' refers to waking up at 2:00 am in the morning and driving for 2 hours to get to a location to do a morning shoot for a client of a farm in the Eshowe area of Kwazulu-Natal. The problem is that we just don't have any leeway in terms of alternative days. The images need to be created for an article that the client is putting together for a newspaper feature and the weather forecast looks wet for the the next week, let alone just for the next 24 hours. I have to admit that at 4am, waiting for my contact on the side of the road with rain pattering down on the bonnet of my car, I was starting to question my own sanity.

One Flash Wonder Workshop

Last week we held our 'One Flash Wonder' workshop near Shongweni Dam outside Durban. The venue was an incredible set of dilapidated farm houses and an old abandoned chapel sourced courtesy of my wonderful assistant Claire. Our model for the morning was Chloe Stone, a beautiful and very patient young woman from Durban. 

Composing The Dragon

Composition is never an easy thing to achieve. Readers of the site know that I often talk about the 'Element Approach' to composition. It's still something that I regularly work on, and will ultimately (I hope) come out in published form. One thing I have been lacking though is critical discussion around composition, particularly from a fellow landscape photographer. I had it in bucket-loads over the last recently!

For eight days I have been in the Drakensberg with Joe Cornish, Denis Hocking (of Hocking Photographic) and Nick van der Wiel (Tailor Made Safaris) locating venues for future potential photographic workshops. Weather, as is per the norm for the Drakensberg, was variable. Hot sun, soaking rain and gear penetrating drizzle. Not that dissimilar to British weather I suppose. The photographic opportunities were fantastic though.