Troll-pilgrim

Kia ora tatou:

Now that I am back, de-jetlagged, downloaded and transferred, and the Bridge of the Starship Enterprise ( BOTSE), also known as my workspace, is at full warp factor, there are things to be shared.

1. You didn’t hear it here, but……the newsletter of a certain NZ camera club ( no names, no pack drill)  advertised that anybody coming (oops!) to the next  meeting could expect to see X put on a mounting display for the club. One can only guess at the degree of audience participation…which reminds me of a standard Best Man’s joke I heard many times ( I photographed 800+ weddings): Have you heard the joke about someone asking for a photograph of the bride and groom, 4 by 6, mounted?  They replied that the best they could do was one of them holding hands…
2. (more…)

Views, Wilderness

Kia ora tatou:

1. As many of you who are Facebook friends will know, I came to South Africa this time to get married to Heather and the ceremony took place in the labyrinth where we met last year. If you are interested, you can see some photographs here.  I know that some of you want to know, so the answer to your question is: She is South African, an actuary by trade and experience, has been an investment portfolio manager and currently is involved in health economics and policy, working on South Africa’s attempt to introduce a National Health scheme. She is also a qualified Ayurvedic medicine practitioner and has considerable training in homoeopathy and a love of Chinese Medicine.  Her website is here.  Heather and I will be travelling back to Hanmer at the end of the month. She has yet to experience a New Zealand winter, let alone one in the mountains…We will be essentially vagrant (or  vagrantly essential) for the next week, so if any of you email me, please don’t be offended if a response takes a few days to come.  It will be an as and when possible situation.

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Kia ora tatou:

1. Over January and February this year, I put together a series of articles on landscape photography, which have been published in the Australian magazine, Digital Photo and Design. Their April 2010 issue contains these articles. I have written on lighting, composition, tripods and the making of images. Included in this post is a sample article, which you are free to download and read. The magazine is out now at booksellers in Australia and certain New Zealand retailers.  Download it here. Sample Story
2. Winterlight is now full to bursting and I am really looking forward to it ( I  know I put my down jacket somewhere…). The good news is that Sony NZ have agreed to supply kit for it, including laptops, A900 and A850 cameras, along with a selection of lenses, including some very nice Zeiss glass and SAL Gold lenses. These will be available for participants to use in the field ( and play with in the privacy of their own cabins…).
3. Mary Jo Bedford and I are working on developing a combined workshop in Creativity which incorporates our own, to my mind, complementary approaches to making photographs. We are working towards a date later in the year, possibly September or October. If you think this interests you, please drop either of us a line, and we will keep you informed. This workshop will be for people who are already competent photographers, and who are looking to expand the range of what they do. (more…)

I suppose I have been teaching photography for some 20 years now, and I have seen some wonderful images made. Every so often however, I get a student whose work blows me away and makes me feel hopelessly inadequate.
A sort of bugger-why-didn’t-I-see-that feeling. It usually happens several times a year. And that is great. It encourages me and oftentimes reminds me how many good (no, great) images are being made all the time, born to blush unseen and waste their sweetness on the desert air, to quote Gray.

And then there are the geniuses who really do have the talent and the determination. They are so good that I wonder what I could possibly have to offer them. Their work is damned consistently stunning that I have to make sure it gets shared, any way I can. So I intend to use this blog to show what they are doing.
By now you will be looking at the images in this post and maybe wondering about the author-in this case, authoress.

Harriet has been a pupil of mine for the last 10 months or so. She turned up with one of those 3 megapixel point-and-shoots that some of my learners bring along, you know the ones that most of us use to snap our family events. With very little input on my part, she got on with it, asking only for the odd bit of advice here and there, and doing it her way. I am glad I kept my big clodhoppers out of it. Her vision is too unique to be directed. These images are humbling, living proof of the adage that it’s not what you’ve got, it’s what you do with it that counts.

Harriet posts her work to an online community called deviantART( no it’s not what you think). If you want to see what the new generation of photographers are doing go trawling through it. Some very exciting work here. You can find Harriet’s section here.

Oh, and did I mention? She is just 17