In ancient footsteps

One of the most rare privileges of this world is meeting living legends. In January, I had such a pleasure, working with !Khomani San tribal leader Dawid Kruiper. But it was an experience I came away from elated and at the same time saddened at what is probably soon to be a lost treasure.

Yster Fester

Living on tribal land near Askham in the Kalahari, oom Dawid and his small band precariously balance their ancient Bushman lifestyle with the inevitable push of Western culture. The pressure has ravaged their band. Alcoholism is rife and the people of the tribe have resorted to peddling artefacts next to the road, doing San dances for tourists wearing the traditional !gai loincloth in what !Khwa ttu anthropologist Michael Diaber describes as the “worst form of prostitution” ever.

Over the years, the bushmen have retained much of their ancient and extensive knowledge of the veld. It’s an instinctive sensibility that seems hardly dimmed by time.  But it’s under pressure as years of living away from their ancestral land is now taking its toll. The young bushmen are mostly not interested in retaining the old ways, the older bushmen. They  grow up in towns, not in the veld, and only on rare occasions are taught field craft and hunting. Most of them seem to prefer wearing mirrored shades and hanging around the many bottle stores in the area, music blaring from cell phones.

I have worked with the !Khomani tribe before, photographing oom Dawid in the 90s while they were living at Kagga Kamma in the Ceres Karoo during a resettlement attempt. I also visited them here with the late dream interpreter Rozelle Mazetti, and following Michael’s career from resident Kagga Kamma anthropologist to starting !Kwa ttu a few years ago. It’s a subject close to my heart. With this dwindling treasure in mind, I visited the !Khomani tribe in the heat of January to shoot footage of them in their traditional clothing, recording their tribal tongue and searching for the elusive hoodia gordonii plant with them – the latter discovered by the bushmen centuries ago and used for its appetite suppressant qualities.

After obtaining advice from Michael on how to approach the tribe with suitable sensitivity after so many years of not seeing the Kruipers, I travelled to Askham and met first with Elias “Yster” Fester. I shot some footage of him pretending to be hunting, feeling a bit silly until I heard Yster mumbling away and pointing at the ground. “The steenbok stood around here in the shade, and ate from this bush. And a muskeljaatkat (genet) was chasing a dune rat over here.” At first I assumed he was doing this for my benefit, to add authenticity to the footage (a true professional, he is!), but then discovered he was actually reading spoor. To my eyes, there were slight indentations in the ground, and faint marks on the bush. To his, the signs told of what time of day it happened, and what the animal’s state of mind was, unhurried or pursued. Suddenly my “canned bushman” experience became very real.

We sat down in the hot veld, and my lesson in field craft started. Yster pointed out the tracks to me, explaining signs I could barely follow, indicating a dragging of a hoof indicating the slow, hot progress of a buck at midday, the crisp and finely defined spoor of the dune rat indicating early morning movement over slightly damp soil. He shot with his bow and arrow, showing the effective distance of the arrow (not much more than 20 metres), which meant having to stalk a buck to well within that distance. He indicated, where we sat, how he would have stalked this steenbok, one of the most renowned of alert animals, showing his path from bush to final clump of grass. How long would this take? Several hours, he says, not even blinking.

Because of the lack of effective range, the prey would inevitably only be wounded, necessitating in many cases many hours of running after it. And this is where the hoodia plant became indispensible – rich in moisture, the semi-bitter juice would quench their thirst while suppressing their appetites, allowing them to physically run down the wounded animal without expiring themselves.

My next stop was the 67-year-old Buks Kruiper, brother of the tribal leader. Oom Buks is no more than 5 foot tall, wiry, wily and extremely witty. His tales are tall, in the tradition of bushman storytelling, but nevertheless entertaining. He is experienced in the film industry, having played in several movies and rubbing noses with an Eskimo in a TV commercial. As a tracker, he is renowned and used extensively by Sanparks in tracking cheetahs for research. His popularity however is not shared by the neighbours, coloured subsistence farmers whose land had been largely expropriated and given to the bushmen. It was on one such farm that Oom Buks and I were accosted by the irate female farm owner, accusing him and his tribe of taking away their land. Oom Buks just shook his head, tears in his eyes and speechless in the face of such aggression. I got him away from there as quickly as I could, moving our shoot elsewhere.

Buks Kruiper's family. He is second from left.

On my final day on shoot, Yster took me back to Askham to meet with Oom Dawid Kruiper. Strangely enough, he remembered me from the shoot we did in the 90s. Sitting with him under a lone camel thorn on a blanket, the heat now a humid 41 degrees, it was like stepping back into African history. The only difference was that we were meeting as fellow human beings, not as the hunter and hunted, the appalling memory of these people being licenced as game that may legally be killed by farmers not far away from my mind. Did we actually do this?

We were now hunting hoodia. And the only place where we would be able to find it, was back in the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, 80km away. The !Khomani have access to a section of the western park where they train youngsters field craft, tracking and hunting. Oom Dawid offered to take us there – he was convinced he saw some hoodia between some dunes. I jumped at the opportunity – I would see part of the Park that is closed to the public, a once-off opportunity sweetened by the fact that I was being guided by the original inhabitants of this land. It does not come any more real, any more authentic.

Yster with the hoodia plant

But it would not be that easy. Did I mention hoodia was elusive? Over the dunes we went, in lion country, with literally one arrow and a bow as protection. I was banking on the fact that I was the youngest and probably the fastest, in case of being chased by lion, but ten minutes into our search for the plants, I was panting badly and dragging my feet and tripod. Lion food, no doubt.

Yster found a plant. It’s spiky, like a cactus, and in springtime carries oddly pink or lilac flowers. Using his arrow head, he cut a section, skinned it and ate the flesh. Inside, it looks like a cucumber – juicy and green. And bitter, apparently. Stupidly, I did not taste it – in hindsight, that would have perfectly rounded this privileged experience. During our shoot, Oom Dawid wandered off into the veld and returned with a carrot-like root, apparently also extremely rare. He was very pleased at finding one, which he uses to prepare medicines. He talks about his preparations, and I quickly realise he is famed for most notably those that, shall we say, rival the effects of Viagra.

Walking the veld with the 76-year-old tribal chief was as intense an experience as I could ever have hoped for. Thankfully, I could record this in sound and motion, as most likely, it would be one of the last such opportunities, as time and reality catch up with their ancient ways.

Oom Dawid, Yster and I at the hoodia shoot

Grit, spit and bear it

So there I was, being tested by an 80km/h wind on top of a Transnet building in Cape Town’s container terminal. The wind was so strong I could not walk around the corner of the building without holding on to the air conditioning units bolted onto the roof. The parapet wall was only hip high, and there was a very real chance that I could be blown over it and down five stories. What’s worse was that I had to endure another hour of this before the magic light would arrive. My hair, eyes and ears were gritty with sand blown everywhere.

HDR shot of the location. The contrast was so high I had to do a 2-shot exposure, which accounts for the banding in the sky.

The brief was simple – the client wanted a Christmas tree look for a magazine cover shot, the Christmas edition. Lots of lights from the city, the containers visible in the foreground, the cranes silhouetted. The only problem was that the overhead lights in the container yard were not all operational, causing a massive dark hole centre to my shot. And the southeaster was blowing the crap out of everything. And I only had this evening to do it.

There weren’t really any other angles I could shoot, and the light above the mountains was fading fast into exactly the right intensity to allow for that magic moment when foreground and background light were balanced. The dark hole, however, was spoiling everything – I was hoping for the container yard lights lifting the exposure level in the foreground at least two stops to retain some detail, which would allow me to shoot slightly earlier and retain some more sky detail as well. But with the lights dead, it meant I had to wait until the background light was two stops less before I could balance foreground and background. And that meant that I would lose some of the beautiful sky detail.

The only option left to me was an HDR shot (high dynamic range), a combination of a series of images shot locked-off on tripod keeping the focus and aperture the same, but altering the shutter speeds of the shots to expose for the sky, then the middle of the exposure range, then the dark areas, and combining the three or more images using specialist software. HDR images require a rock-solid tripod with absolutely no movement whatsoever, even using a wireless remote to trigger the camera without touching the tripod.

You try doing that in a blasting gale.

Hanging on to the tripod and shielding it as much as I could with my body, I got the shots, and got the hell outta there. Back home, I put the images through Capture NX2, rendered the raw files to 16 bit tiffs, and combined the images using NIK’s HDR EFEX Pro. The HDR shot was OK, but it lacked the really punchy feel that the client wanted. In her words, “Gaan bos met die filters.” That I did, selecting the dead spot in the centre of the frame and punching that up with a bit of bleach bypass and localised contrast enhancement, and I cooked up the sky to get rid of the inevitable banding, then added a bit of grain to even out the colour transitions and banding in the sky. I even cloned in an extra light on top of the nearest post (the dead one) to “decorate” the Christmas tree a little bit more. All the post-processing absolutely ruins the quality of the shot, making it noisy as hell, but that was inevitable, given the requirement. And it was done on time, which was probably more important.

Flight fantastic

Powered paragliding is one of the most convenient photography platforms. And when someone else can do the driving, it’s even better. Such was the case this week when I hooked up, quite literally, with PPG instructor Keith Pickersgill, one of the doyens of the sport in SA. He needed a passenger, I needed some footage, and the weather was perfect for an afternoon tandem flight.

I had long ago sold my own paramotor, but kept in touch with the current batch of pilots, with the result that I get to fly quite regularly still. As always, it’s a thrill to take off on level ground and change your perspective on the earth. But clutching a very expensive video camera makes one a tad nervous. Hence I had a very thick bungy cord attached to the camera, and tied off onto a carabiner, ready to roll.

Armed with a brand new bluetooth headset, the comms between Keith and myself was wireless and wonderful. Launch went fine, even with my precious cargo held at arm’s length and out of the way of the bar in front of the cage. We set off from Dolphin Beach and followed another pilot at close quarters for some air-to-air footage, then flew out to the stranded Seli 1 to shoot some overhead material of the ship. The air was slightly bumpy, and the footage not entirely smooth, but I got a good idea of what angles work for this platform.

See a standard definition video from the flight:

See a high definition video from the flight:

Winemasters at work

Interviewing Distell director Duimpie Bayly

Two days, non-stop shooting, not a moment off our feet. That’s the Nederburg Auction for you. The icon of SA wine auctions, held at Nederburg in Paarl, is an unmissable event – if you can get an invite. It is that tight. But then again, you rub shoulders with the who’s who of the wine industry and the higher strata of Cape Town social life.

Fellow Safrea member Michal Wozniak and I shot the event for the Nederburg Auction over the two days, using an EX1 and EX3, with the auctioneer Anthony Barne wirelessly mic’d.

Between the two of us, we could cover events in the main auction hall and chase after people we wanted to interview on the fly, although running with tripod, microphones and camera proved tricky! Low light in the auction hall also made life a little harder than what was needed, and necessitated shooting at gain+3 at times. Still, the cameras performed really well with the unavoidable noise well within control.

The production was edited at two stations – the rough edit on my machines, and then fine-tuned by maestro Ruan Neethling.

View the final production here, and visit the Auction website to watch the pre-auction clips we produced for the event. Pictures on this page by Matt Stow.

Panic makes perfect

Story of my life. You get the call the night before – can you please do an editorial shoot tomorrow at nine, here are the contact details, this is what we want – loads of power, energy, make the people the heroes, and by the way, did we mention this is for a cover shot?

Yeah right.

There’s nothing quite like panic and unpreparedness to galvanise you into action. I hate it, of course, and bitch about every moment while struggling with adverse weather, non-perfect light, stands blowing over, people unceremoniously commandeered from work stations and supervisors not happy about the work delays …  But in the end, somehow you pull it off. Against all odds. And herein lies the problem – because the commissioning editor thinks you can do this all the time and keep calling at the very last minute.

Maybe you can. Maybe you do. It’s just dicey and it certainly does not add years to your life. My fear is that some day, it just won’t all come together. But then again, I suppose if it is impossible to get the shot, you’d still pull off the impossible. I try not to think about it, and will cross that bridge when I get to it.

This shoot involved Transnet workers on a railway. The brief was to make it gritty, dirty, tough. I chose a 200mm Nikon f2.8 lens for the job to compress the perspective and separate the person in the foreground from the back. The sun was camera right. I exposed for the highlights, then added a Quantum flash camera left to fill in the shadows, and added a Nikon Speedlight camera left and behind the subject to give a bit of wrap and edge to the right side of his face (camera left). That added a 3D feel, and again helped separate the background out. I added a bit of bleaching and tonal contrast to the image to accentuate the gritty details on the gloves and stones between the tracks. Shot at f6.3, 320th/sec on focal plane shutter.

Head on the Bloc

Talk about being photogenic. Some faces are just easier to photograph, and then, some pieces of furniture just turn out more gorgeous than the next. Such a case was these items from Bloc Outdoor in Cape Town – chunky, solid balau wood furniture that just look great on camera and were so sweet to shoot.

We shot this in the Bloc showroom in Woodstock. For once, I had some space to work with. A white vinyl backdrop suspended from the cable trays served to isolate the items, and four Bowens Esprit heads lit the items. We used softboxes for accent lights to pick up the flat surfaces, and a bounced bare bulb reflector at the back lit up the backdrop. Finally, a white umbrella in front set at low output just filled in the shadows to minimise electronic noise in the darker areas.

 

Sheer talent

What a talent – he’s a schoolboy, almost dwarfed by his models, but Hugo Amos, a Worcester grade 10 pupil, is running his own business designing and making Matric dance dresses.

This last weekend, we did a shoot to showcase some of his designs. The models were classmates, the make-up done by one of his teachers.

Hugo is absolutely in charge – he knows, he feels colours, he mixes textures, he even positioned models in front of this and that to match colours and textures, helped them pose, suggested head and leg positions that made the body lines better … I learnt a lot, and in the end had my work halved through his brilliant directing.

He does not even have a driver’s licence, and had his school teacher drive him and his classmates out to Philadelphia. The teacher was also hairdresser and MUA – and did so brilliantly, claiming it’s the first time she’s done this. The models were first-timers too -  except one – and with a little bit of direction from us very quickly got into the spirit of things, going over the top with facial expressions and body posture to match the sometimes outrageous outfits they were wearing.

Next move – he wants to oursource the actual stitching of the dresses while he focuses on design work. Big thinker! I’m blown away by so much natural, unshaped talent. Where do the kids get it? (I call them kids in revenge of them calling me “oom” (uncle) all day. Serves them right) Imagine where they’ll be in a few years if this raw talent is pushed in the right direction.

We chose Philadelphia as the area is quaint, quirky and offered loads of off-beat spots – a perfect backdrop for the wardrobe. It also has narrow streets and white, north-facing walls (huge reflectors) that made lighting a dawdle. I used a Quantum flash to add a light line down the side of the body on the opposite side to the sun, slightly from behind for a bit of light wrap to the front, just to help give a hint of 3D and depth to the bodies. Coupled with a short depth of field on the Nikon 80-200mm f2.8 fitted with a polariser to cut the light down to 250th f4, I managed to sync the flash to the D700′s flash sync speed.

Hugo Amos in centre with models and teacher (right)

The fear of landscapes

Until recently, I had this thing about landscapes. Yes, I could see a nice picture, yes, I could set it up, but damn if I could capture the clarity, the nuances of light that made the scene so special. It was just too frustrating. To be honest, I was a little afraid of shooting these commercially. For that reason, I rarely took on landscape commissions.

Shooting with a Nikon D300 and D200 didn’t help either – the clarity, in my opinion, was just not enough. I turned instead to trying HDR photography, and tried retaining some of the highlight detail and opening up shadow detail that way, but this was equally frustrating. The software was just not good enough for a subtle result.

Early morning at Langebaan Country Estate. These are special moments, usually windless and quiet, yet you hardly notice since that magic light's effect only lasts literally a few minutes during which you scramble frantically to get into your "ambush" shooting position.

Then three things happened that changed the game. First, I realised how much potential was locked up in my existing cameras’ raw files if I used specialised local contrast enhancers. Secondly, I invested in a wireless remote trigger to ensure absolutely no camera shake during the typically long exposures, and finally, I bought the D700 – a total game-changer.

The D700 purchase came about after testing the Nikon D3X, which should have been yards better than the D700 but was not, in my opinion. It certainly was not R50k better. The D700 sensor is special. It retains clarity, it has a huge dynamic range, allowing detail in shady areas without becoming too noisy, which allows one to expose for the highlights, and in Capture NX2, pull back the shadows seamlessly using the U-point technology to define and limit areas of change without affecting the rest of the image.

The result: confidence that I could get the shot, and with it, a new-found sense of creativity and rediscovered joy in shooting landscapes.

A moment before, a catabatic wind was ruffling the lake's surface. Seconds after the shot, the wind changed direction and killed the mirror-like surface.

So there I was this week, dodging Cape winter storms, scanning forecasts and looking for the perfect opportunity to shoot a series of landscapes at De Zalze estate outside Stellenbosch. I had a very short window of opportunity – the weather clearing after a spitting cold front one morning, which left me with a relatively clear afternoon and dusk period, and a clear day the next morning before the next front hit by midday.

As soon as my contacts on site reported sunshine, I rushed through and got set up. The biggest issue was where to position myself. The site is huge, and the opportunities for great shots endless. But it’s all about positioning – where to place yourself at what time of day. And this, I realise more and more, is what landscape photography seems to be about – ambushing the light.

Late afternoon at De Zalze. The golfers walking into the shot were unplanned but lent a very necessary element to the shot.

In the afternoons, it’s easier, since you can see the lowering sun starting to shape the landscape as deepening shadows define the undulations of the scene. Mostly, I shoot backlit scenes for their depth of contrasts and shape-defining shadows created towards the camera side of obstacles. And mostly, this is relatively easy to shoot, since you can see things shaping up as the source of light sinks lower in the sky. All you do is find an element in the foreground to lead your eye into the shot, expose for the highlights (a spot meter in the camera is handy here), and make sure you don’t bump the camera.

Straight after sunrise at De Zalze. These are the kinds of moments you cannot plan for unless you know the area extremely well. It's dark, then it gets light, then you see the shot, then you scramble to get it.

At dawn, however, things are a lot harder. I start before sunrise, and in the dark, try to guess where the sun will hit first, where it will create shadows, and where I should position myself to make the most of it. Literally, you ambush the light. And every morning, I fail miserably.

Where I guestimate the shot will shape nicely is usually nowhere correct, leading to a mad scramble as you see a shot developing 30 degrees left or right of your position. But that’s par for the course. I have come to realise that any given scene will offer a number of treatments at various times of the year as the sun moves through its winter-to-summer arc, lighting the same scene from infinitely variable directions.

That’s why one of the best bits of advice for shooting landscapes is to set up a few days for a particular shoot – to go out at least one morning and one evening, and getting a feel for the way the landscape responds to the morning and evening light. Shoot what you can, but don’t stress. Learn about the particular landscape, note where the sun comes up and goes down, and start planning around that, so that the next time you’re on site, you can position yourself in a perfect ambush position. Well, as perfect as any ambush can be.

My Ansel Adams moment. I was taking a breakfast break from shooting, saw this spot and as a joke set up a wireless transmitter on my D300 to take the shot from a distance.

One of the things I struggle with still is to relax while on site, and allowing the landscape to change, to go to full colour as the light sinks down, without panicking about not getting the shot. Invariably, the best shots come a minute before the sun sinks down or seconds after it appears, and are often hastily-adjusted, framed and exposed shots, not carefully planned and executed.  That’s the nature of the beast.

Using a 300mm lens rather than a wide angle changes the way you look at landscapes and allows isolation of interesting elements in the scenery.

Another trick I learnt was to leave my extreme wide angle in the bag. It makes you lazy, and it hides detail. My 14-24 rarely gets used. Instead, I shoot most everything on a 24-70mm, and increasingly, the 70-200mm. Used on the D300 with its crop sensor, the 200 becomes a 300mm, with even greater compression of the perspective, a factor that I have come to love in landscapes. It helps me combine elements in a shot that otherwise would have been too distant from each other to be significant. Like the lone tree on the blind rise, the detail of the mountain behind, and the vineyards in the foreground.

Seen through a wide angle lens, you are acutely aware that the three elements are literally 10km apart. Yet on this photo, they seem to be on a single focal distance. Great for landscapes! The longer lens also allows me to isolate certain elements, or rather to eliminate other, unwanted clutter, and so doing to reduce the image to only the elements you need to help tell your story.

Traditionally, landscapes are shot at f16 or thereabouts for maximum field depth, but I find myself increasingly shooting shallow focus shots these days, aided by the already short depth of field on the D300 with the 200mm lens. I’d focus on an element, like a leaf off a tree in front of a house, for instance and by defocusing the home behind, just hint at habitation instead of cluttering my image. I guess this is a result of years of shooting stock, where isolation of the relevant element is crucial.  Limiting depth of field is therefore a huge help in isolating the elements that tell the story.

Pano of 6 images, taken hand-held, in a rush.

Oh, drama, drama!

What do you do if you have to re-enact a potentially dangerous traffic situation for a video production in which a pedestrian is (almost) run over by a delivery truck? Well, first of all you make sure that you don’t play the role of the pedestrian. You ask a family member. Or someone else.

Secondly, you make sure the whole scene is damn well planned. Every camera angle, duration of each shot, and matched precisely to the voice-over. Then you shoot, and hope to hell your driver stops when he’s supposed to – and that the “stuntman” pays attention!

The stunt actor in this case is my long-suffering nephew, Wian, a student who gets called in for the hard stuff at every opportunity. On location in the Roeland Street area in Cape Town, we set up and rehearsed the scene a few times, interrupted by vehicles wanting to pass in the narrow street every two minutes, and finally got to shoot the sequences – from the front, low angle on the feet, from inside the van, a GoPro shot on a pole attached to the van … I swear that by the end of the day, Wian’s right arm was about three inches longer thanks to the heavy metal he was carrying.

Fortunately, everything turned out fine. We managed to stop closer and closer to him as confidence grew, and got the shot in the can before Wian turned into roadkill. Shot on a Sony EX1 and GoPro POV camera. Watch the whole production here:

Lighting the nude 2

A brush-up course with a previous student, two models in one day, and this time we really cooked. Neville, the student, had the benefit of our previous shoot and lighting setups, so we picked up where we left.

The only difference this time was that we simplified our lighting setup, using two 50cm softboxes on either side, plus a bare bulb fill light to just open up the shadows in the middle of the models’ figures caused by the two side lights. We used my new Bowens Esprit 250W kits next to the older Bowens Esprit 500s.

The fill light potentially can kill the atmosphere, but we controlled it by pushing the ligh stand all the way to the white ceiling, and limiting its spread to just the immediate area of the model’s front. We trusted that the rapid fall-off of light would contain the rest of the spread. And it did – even when shooting on a white background, we managed to contain the spread enough to turn the white to a non-distracting grey. I am now starting to appreciate what is possible in even a small studio.

 

Don’t believe everything you see

Smoke and mirrors – sometimes literally. In the modern era of Photoshop, a lot of the old-school photo techniques have been replaced by plain digital art. Or what masquerades for art, sometimes.

Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the world of high-reflectives. In this case, a number of very heavy chrome taps that arrived at the studio. Make ‘em look good. OK. But how do you get them to stand up while we do it?

This shoot called for some nifty tricks. Usually I would suspend the items with very thin fishing line, and remove any signs of this later. But these babies were heavy, lopsided and decidely unfriendly to work with. They kept falling over, no amount of sticking down with Prestik. It called for drastic measures – Photoshop.

... and after

This mixer, for instance, had a mind of its own. So out came various props, boxes and more Prestik, and it became a bit of a balancing act. As soon as it looked like my contraption was going to stay upright, I fired the trigger – and seconds later it would all come crashing down. Deep breath, go make coffee, stay calm …

Before ...

And so it went, all day. No wonder no photographer wants to shoot these!

Still, chrome is the most beautiful surface to shoot. Love it. I used big polystyrene boards to light the faces of the mixers, and in Photoshop removed all props and signs of my cheating.

It makes one wonder – how did they do it in the old days, when they produced brilliant pictures and had to do so with film, Polaroids and no Photoshop? A lost art?

... and after

 

Before ...

 

Lighting the nude

Don’t let anyone tell you this is fun. Well, it is, kinda. But it’s a load of hard work too, if you’re really serious about getting the lighting right and not just perving the babe.

Neville getting on top of things

So there we were, student Neville Preston from East London and I, and in front of us, Violet from Vladivostok. No really, she’s Russian. Even speaks with that James Bond movie accent. And as you can probably tell, she’s not shy.

Neville joined me for a two-day workshop in nude lighting, a one-on-one course I occasionally present. Occasionaly because it is a heap of hard work, hot and cramped in my small studio. But totally satisfying if you get the lighting right, as in the case of Neville’s results below.

We used two Bowens softboxes, mostly in a backlighting position, to allow the fall-off of light to the front of Violet’s body define shape. Since we used loads of black velvet cloth to absorb stray light, the fall-off was quite severe, and we had to judiciously add light to open up the shadows just a bit. Reflectors and a bare bulb light fired into the opposite wall did the trick.

The trick was to keep the studio dark and use the modelling lights to define her body shape. It was critical getting the elevation of the lights just right. Too high, and the shadow camera side of her body receded too much, killing the effect, and too low and behind her, the softbox would start creeping into shot. A boom arm with the light on top helped though.

We also extensively used screens to stop light from the softboxes fall onto the backdrop and cause unwanted and distracting light blotches on the black background. The schematic to the right shows one such setup – the softbox partially masked off to darken that side of the studio, and another black screen on the right side of the model to deepen the shadow on that side of her body.

Something’s wrong with this picture

Glen Dell. Cool, calm and collected

So there we were, 5000 ft above the Atlantic Seaboard, the door of the aircraft open, a fresh breeze cooling us down. And right next to us, a mere 10 ft away, was another aircraft. Upside down. Something’s wrong with this picture.

To make matters worse, the photographer and pilot, Anthony Allen, is not steering our aircraft. Guess who’s gone white knuckle around the yoke!

The shoot was an air-to-air job for Red Bull and BP, photographing their new Extra 330 acrobatic planes against the backdrop of Table Mountain and the Atlantic Seaboard. Anthony, an aerial photographer and long-time fellow paraglider, invited me along “to just help him look out for other aircraft” while he was shooting.

Aerial photographer Anthony Allen

I was happy to oblige, because I could drag my video equipment along for hopefully some rare air-to-air footage as well.

Taking off from Cape Town International, the air was really bumpy thanks to a brisk southeaster causing all kinds of mischief downwind of the Table Mountain massif, but fortunately, I was not flying the aircraft through the turbulence. Yet.

Above 5000 ft the air went silky-smooth, though, and allowed us to cosy up to Red Bull race pilot Glen Dell, a master at the helm, who at one stage flew no more than 5 ft away from us! My job was to keep one eye on the skies for other aircraft, and the other on Glen, in case he touched our Cessna 172. I’m still squinty-eyed as a result.

The next afternoon we were back, operating in the same area to shoot the BP aircraft. Again, thanks to some really professional piloting (not mine), the shoot again went off like clockwork with Glen pulling some spectacular aerial moves right next to us, a priviliged grandstand seat.

With 330 HP in a 650kg aircraft, he could literally stall and almost hover the aircraft at full power right next to our much slower plane. I managed to shoot some video with my EX1 running all the time, pointing out the open door behind our seats.

For the record, Anthony shot these images on a Canon EOS1MKIIIs, using an 80-300 IS f3.5 lens, shooting on shutter priority at around 200/f5.6-11 to help freeze the action.

How to ruin a perfectly good shirt

An empty chutney bottle at my home just begged to be put to a new use. And since I had been experimenting with high speed flash all week, it wasn’t long before the bottle got washed, the studio set up and ready for a stock shoot featuring myself as the unfortunate idiot.

I say idiot, because, in my infinite wisdom, I thought I’d mix some dishwashing liquid into the bottle with the food colouring – just to soften the blow on the shirt that no doubt was going to get splashed. Now that may have half saved the shirt, but the soap did what soaps do to your eyes. In case you were wondering, that grimace was not an act. It’s the real thing. It stung like hell.

Splashed - the series

The fun part of this shoot though was experimenting with the lighting – and more specifically, the trigger. I set up everything, checked levels, then switched off all the modelling lights on the Bowens heads, closed the blinds, darkened the room completely, and set a 3 second exposure on my D700. The camera was set to timer release to allow me to get into a pre-focused position. With a Pocket Wizard remote trigger held out of shot, I then waited for the timer release to open the shutter, squirted the bottle, then hit the Pocket Wizard trigger half a second later to pop the lights. This recorded a brief second of exposure, catching the fluid in the air, and in me in the eye.

I had only one shot at it, since I knew the first squirt would cover my shirt. A very gentle first attempt however missed my shirt and face, but made a huge mess of the floor. But because I now had my timing and positioning right, I went for it, and hit a bullseye on the next attempt. Mine.

The aftermath - from Photoshop to mop expert

This was the studio setup – a beauty dish on a boom as key light (f18), flanked by a softbox far right and grid spot corner left. The back lights were one stop hotter than the key light to put some cheekbone definition into the shot, and the black doors in the front were an attempt to keep some of the keylight output falling onto the backdrop, which I wanted to keep a shade of gray.

And the shirt? It made it, thankfully. Dishwasher helps.

Langebaan lifestyle

This must rank as one of my toughest shoots ever. Small budget, no assistant, no time. And the shotlist was huge – golf landscapes early morning, lifestyle shots with models thereafter, interior design shots by midday, more lifestyle in the afternoon, then golf atmospherics at dusk, closing the day with indoor lifestyle shots with the models at sunset. It’s a tall order. Now throw in inclement weather, a near-drowing and a boomslang on the loose, and you have the makings of an interesting two days.

Johan "Bakkie Man" Winterbach aka the Human Light Pole with models Hanri and Staff

Bakkie Man playing silly buggers. Note the eyewear.

Fortunately the agency’s Johan Winterbach was at hand to help with the equipment and art directing. Always ready with a joke, he’s a mood enhancer on any shoot. Not to mention handy with holding the odd Speedlight and bounce board. Catch him as the Bakkie Man on Supersport’s “Oor die Kole”.

What made this even tougher was the range of work we had to do – interiors, tripod work, to exteriors with flash. I could not use the studio head outdoors as there was no AC power to work from, but had packed my Quantum battery system and softbox. Sadly, because of a huge cold front rolling in, we had to condense a day of outdoor shooting into two hours. Which meant no time for the fiddly Quantum setup. I used the single SB800 speedlight to brighten up colours on the models where needed, and for the larger group shots, used a daylight reflector from the down-sun side. Fortunately the day was not too contrasty, and the ambient lighting quite pleasing.

Staff doing his Captain Morgan impersonation.

For the outdoor shots, I used the Nikon D700 and Nikon 70-200mm f2.8 almost exclusively, and almost always on f5.6. There is something magic about this f-stop on the lens, sharp as a tack, and the background pleasingly out of focus with beautiful bokeh in the highlights. For the rest of indoor work, I used the 24-70 f2.8 on around f11, and mixed the outdoor lighting with my Bowens strobes to fill in the darker spots and add accent on furniture. This could be tricky, as the outdoor light frequently gave me readings above the 250th top synching shutter speed on the D700, which forced me to compromise by overexposing the window lights a bit. But remarkably, the D700 retained detail. This was my first big shoot with the D700, in which I used it in a variety of lighting situations and could check how it handles noise in dark areas, detail in highlights and colour shifts in mixed lighting situations. I come back simply astounded – post-processing required, compared with images from my D300, is cut by at least 70%. It is simply too good to be true.

And nowhere was this more visible than when shooting golf landscapes. These are typically shot within ten minutes after sunrise and ten minutes before sunset. You want loads of contrast, very low light and very bright highlights all in the same frame in order to shape the undulations of the course. If you’re going to have problems with noise and artefacting in the low light areas of the image, this is it. But there was very little to discern. In fact, retaining highlights remain the biggest problem (in the sky), so I used a Lee neutral density filter to bring the sky detail back into range where possible. Of course, shooting straight into the sun left no chance of that. Hence the post colouring of the sky, to give some detail at least.

All in all, the D700 handled it all very well, even where it had no help from external light sources such as in the golf shot to the right.

If you want detail in the course lawn, you have to shoot low angle, straight to the sun. That’s a recipe for disaster normally, but in this case, the camera pulled it off.

After having put it through its paces outside, I was wondering what the D700 would do indoors, with mixed lighting from outdoor sources and strobes and a firelight. We shot a sequence in the golf club lounge that required extensive use of mixed lighting, from the standard lamps in the corner of the rooms to matching the exposure of the exterior light filtering through the window at the back, and exposing for the flames. I started by measuring the exposure for the flames, and set a combination of f11 and a shutter speed of around a 20th/sec.

Then I matched the output of the Bowens strobes to f11. I had two accent lights around the corners of the hearth to the right back and left back, respectively, to add a tiny highlight on the models’ cheeks, an umbrella keylight from left to add detail to the front and to the furniture, and fired all with a set of Pocket Wizards. Of course, the models had to keep reasonably still at 20th to avoid movement, but the slow shutter speed is in your favour when shooting flames, as it slightly blurs the movement and makes it look a bit more atmospheric. White balance was set to auto – I did not bother custom white balancing because I liked the slight warm tinge from the background lamps. And shooting at a 20th allowed just enough of the ambient tungsten to creep in and warm up the light balance.

Little Mia shortly before the incident

I did mention a near-drowning and some snake action. One of the models, 2-year old Mia, fell into the pool after the shoot, and sank like a stone. When she hit the bottom, she managed to kick and come up to the surface, but by now the frantic mum threw herself into the water, clothes and all, and fell straight on top of the youngster, pushing her down before she could get air. Quick as a flash, she was out with the child – no harm done, and hardly a whimper from Mia, who was running around the pool lawn five minutes later – and then nearly cut off her toe, presumably on a sharp piece of paving. Mild panic as we tried to stop the profuse bleeding, and once we got that under control, I left the pool enclosure – to walk straight into a huge boomslang in a tree. These are common occurences at Langebaan.

Although hectically poisonous, they are back-fanged and extremely timid. The poor thing tried its best to escape the estate snake catcher and his long tongs. It hid in the garden, and after some broomstick prodding, came blitzing out – straight through my legs and into the garden behind me. It took a two full seconds after he had disappeared before I yelped and jumped several feet into the air. So much for good reflexes!

Let there be light

Sometimes an idea for an image creeps into your subconscious and won’t let go. I dreamt about this one for ages. There is no such lighthouse, and there is no such coastline. Well, not both in the same place, anyway.

With that in mind, I went scouting. Planned. Dreamt some more. Finally found the spots, and then this week, the weather presented itself. Storms, low cloud, strong wind whipping up the foam and splashing my tripod legs. Then my own legs. Ag sis man, not nice.

Finally, the shot’s in the bag. Pushed the speed right down as far as it would go to get some blur in the water (30th), which meant hovering at f22 and far out of the best sharpness range of the 14-24mm f2.8.

Then off to a lighthouse, shot with the 24-70mm f2.8 at f11, and then a full day of Photoshopping to get the two images aligned. It’s not perfect, but it’s there. I can sleep now. Or dream up the next conceptual image.

Good enough to eat!

I suppose life could be worse – having a delicious rack of lamb to photograph … I mean, compared to shooting industrial machinery or construction sites, this is positively stomach-rumbling.

I had these chops prepared at Excellent Meat Market in Milnerton. The butcher very kindly trimmed and spiced the meat for my shoot, and they spent a day in the studio getting tanned by strobes, maturing nicely.

Being such a gorgeous evening, with no wind (unusual for Milnerton), they then ended up on my braai grid. And if you think they look good enough to eat, they were! Simply outstanding meat from my regular butcher.

The studio setup consisted of a small softbox on a boom, overhead, an unsoftened light against the white backdrop to bleach out the background and force attention to the product, and a grid spot from camera left to pick out the textures of the spices on the edge of the meat. A bit of parsley and a sliced tomato added interest and offset the meat colour nicely.

The tree’s my tripod

A recce weekend at the newly-revamped Gary Player course. Misty morning. Me bored. Took my camera and wandered off onto the damp course. The light was flat and uninteresting, but at some point, literally for a few seconds at a time, the sun broke through gaps between the low-lying mist and the higher clouds, creating beautiful backlighting on the blades of grass surrounding the greens.

The only problem was that I had no tripod, and needed to shoot at around f11 and higher for front-to-back sharpness, which pushed the shutter speed down. Further, the sun was shining into the lens, causing flare. I had to raise my camera position to use the mild cloud cover and diffusing effect of the leaves at the top of my frame to bring the contrast range back into usable territory.

The only vantage point from where I could exclude the sun from shining directly into the lens was halfway up a milkwood tree. There were no lower branches, but the trunk was angled enough for a “friction fit” – I jumped up, threw my legs and arms around the trunk, and clung to the tree with my legs clamped solidly (read desperately) around the trunk, leaving my hands free to shoot.

This worked fine – although it looked rather odd. At least, that’s what I read from the face of the security guard on his quad bike patrolling the area.

I had about 5 seconds to get this shot, as the sun briefly illuminated the area well enough to cause hard enough shadows to define the undulations of the course. If I had left it for ten minutes later, the sun would have been too high, causing the frontal shadows to shrink, and the definition and shaping of the course gone.

Fortunately, the sun and clouds played ball and gave me the five seconds to compose, expose and shoot. I got literally one shot. All the others taken before and after lacked the direct, hard light that helps define the shapes in this one so well.

MBM Africa furniture shoot, Gordons Bay

Aiming low to please. The rimflow pool was the hero in our shoot

Tight schedule, loads of furniture, and even a tighter space to work in. So what’s new? Yup, the MBM new summer range had arrived by ship and had to be photographed pronto in time for spring, when people start living outdoors again. The brief was to create a summer look, breezy, fresh, blue and warm. Well, let me tell you the pool was freezing and the day only just short sleeve weather.

Wian and stylist Jean at work

I had my assistant Wian wear a wet suit to set up the supports for the lounger chair, which extended to just under the surface, and helped us make the chair “walk the waters” – almost floating in space.

A Hoya polarising filter helped colour the sky as blue as it can be, and a low angle got us the beautiful reflection off the water.

I used a big Bowens softbox to the left to light the facing side of the chair, and a naked hard light from just to the left of that, straight onto Cariss-Ann, the model, to light up the side of her body and help it it (more) shape.

The trick here was to shoot at the maximum shutter speed that allows full sync (250th at f11), and increasing or decreasing the flash output to match the ambient reading. The polariser helps to bring the exposure back into reasonable territory by cutting the ambient by1.5 stops, so we had a bit of leeway with the flash output, which could quite easily have been inadequate to match that of the sun.

Hayley working on her tan

Golden Gate landscapes, Free State

My wife NIcky and I braved -5 degrees weather to do some winter landscapes around Clarens, Fouriesburg and in Golden Gate national park in July, during the World Cup. It was not only freezing in the mornings and evenings, but the wind chill made it worse. Fortunately we had invested in suitable clothing.

The days were fantastically blue and the footage we got was marvellous. I shot on the Sony EX-1 and was again just blown away by the clarity and dynamic range of the camera. Its ability to retain highlights and shadow detail is mindblowing. I edited a quick 3 minute visual essay on the park which can be viewed here:

A clip from the Highlands movie

This being my first visit here, I was hard pressed to leave. The place is so awesomely photogenic, we spent literally hours driving a few kilometers at a time, stopping, shooting, having a picnic out in the wild, and only returning to camp after the best light had gone. Here, we were in the good hands of park manager John Martiens, a long-standing friend of one of my clients in Cape Town. John showed us around and gave us excellent tips for out-of-the-way shooting locations.

Dawn patrol for the best light

Out in the sticks like a facawe bird

At the entrance to Golden Gate

Farm lake near Wepener

Our view from camp