2008 December | Africa Imagery - Photography in Africa

South Coast Photo Workshop

December 3rd, 2008 Roger 3 comments

This is the first update in quite a while! The reason? Pat and I have been really hectic, working on our book about Africa’s Wild Dogs, due out towards the end of next year. The pix and text are now at the publisher in Cape Town and we spent some time a few weeks back with the designer, Peter Bosman, putting the preliminary layouts together. I’ll post a pic of the cover in the next few days.

We held another of our 3 day Photographic and Photoshop Workshops last weekend down on the KwaZulu Natal South Coast at the Riverbend Crocodile Centre and by all accounts it was a great success. The highlight (of course) was the time we spent with the crocs – and some huge monsters at that! Howard Kelly, owner of Riverbend and our host for the weekend had arranged a “special” feeding event for us and as dead chickens were thrown to the hungry crocs we blazed away with abandon. I have recently changed to Nikon and I must say that the D3 and 200 to 400mm f4 lens that I was using acquitted themselves very well indeed. KwaZulu Natal South Coast at the Riverbend Crocodile Centre and by all accounts it was a great success. The highlight (of course) was the time we spent with the crocs – and some huge monsters at that! Howard Kelly, owner of Riverbend and our host for the weekend had arranged a “special” feeding event for us and as dead chickens were thrown to the hungry crocs we blazed away with abandon. I have recently changed to Nikon and I must say that the D3 and 200 to 400mm f4 lens that I was using acquitted themselves very well indeed.

We also hired a young model and spent some time shooting her in a derelict concrete block factory. This was a new experience for some of the participants, especially since one or two of them were expecting the workshop to be about wildlife only! But the same compositional and technical elements apply and we had great fun afterwards in post production doing various things in Photoshop.

On the Saturday afternoon while we were out doing some pix the mother and father of all storms blew in. We all took refuge in the cars until it had passed. As so often happens in these situations the light and skies after storms can be spectacular and so it was in this case. As soon as it stopped raining we all grabbed our cameras and shot a bunch of pictures of the rocks, sea and sky at Port Edward, frightening the daylights out of a lone fisherman. Clearly, he thought he had done something wrong and we were there to record his misdemeanour!