Photo Reporteur » Personal work

Afrika Burn

admin — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:48:42 +0000

Once a year thousands of new-agers, hippies, trance-heads, ravers, pagans and other free spirits converge on the Karoo in the Cape Province of South Africa for the Burning Man of Africa.

Having been to the event in 2008, I decided to once again attend the 2009 event with a view to creating images with a slight difference.

Because the participants are often dressed so outlandishly I opted to shoot portraits and thus had to take lighting stands and a grey background.

The only problem was that the wind seemed to blow ALL day at the site, so the chance of rigging up a background that would remain in place was slim.

While trying to put the backdrop up in the wind, one of the ‘Burners’ suggested that I just put up the stands and leave the background as is.

What a brilliant idea! This then gave the images of the ‘Burners’ a totally different feel.

What happened was that the empty expanse of the Karoo became part of the image and was not excluded as would have happened had I shot the portraits against a simple grey background.

Thus by trial and error, and some inspiration from the subjects, a series of portraits of AfrikaBurn was created.

For more images in this series view ‘Portraits: Burning Man’ @ :www.kim.co.za

Biker portraits

admin — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:21:07 +0000

Far removed from the world of news and documentary images that are virtually untouched after being created this series of portraits of bikers uses a combination of photographic technique and photo shop to create an illusion.

Clearly all of the work I shoot for EPA adheres to the strict principles of news photography and photojournalism where the only adjustments to images is a resizing and some subtle burning and dodging.

With this series of images I wanted to try something different and came up with the concept of shooting portraits of biker friends of mine.

I shot four different images of the biker from exactly the same view point and with the same lens and obviously same camera.

During the process I framed the top-left then top-right then bottom-right and finally bottom-left of the ‘image’ in front of me.

Then in the modern day dark room;Photo shop 7; I created a blank background in white and copy and pasted the four images onto that white background.

Finally after moving them into place and trying to match the four images as best I could I flattened them into one layer and the final ‘image’ was created.

More from the series can be viewed under ‘ Portraits: Bikers’ @: www.kim.co.za

Identical twins

admin — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:06:00 +0000

Inspired by my identical twin girls, Skye and Shannon, this image is one of a series of portraits shot in Johannesburg on the subject of identical twins.

Shot as a digital image on a Canon Mark 2N and processed in Photo 7 in the ‘layers’ system, the images attempt to cut to the identical nature of the twins by capturing them standing together wearing the same clothing.

More from the series can be viewed under ‘Portraits: Identical Twins’ @: www.kim.co.za