The Art of It

These are two more pictures taken last weekend. Look at the previous post for the background to the challenge we set ourselves. Any comments?

Last weekend we decided to take a drive through to Blaauwberg for lunch and some photography. A visit to Doodles Restaurant, a pubby little place with good food, a boisterous clientele and rather slow service filled the hollow and a couple of beers set the mood for a long walk on the beach and a few photographs. Blaauwberg beach is the vantage point from which the familiar “trademark” picture of Table Mountain is usually taken. So many photographs of “our” mountain have been taken from this vicinity that it has become something of a “photographic cliché.” To try and produce something fresh and interesting was the challenge we set ourselves. Here are two of the many pictures we took. Do you think we succeeded? We will probably post one or two more in a day or two.

Wow. I have started a weekly art class with Phillip Glazer at the Frank Joubert Art School. As you may have gathered I have been battling with colour! For a few weeks now I have been trying to paint sea and landscapes from some of our many photographs, but with disastrous results. What a difference it makes to have a teacher say “leave it alone now, that’s perfect”, before you over do things. How helpful it is have someone there to give advice on mixing shades and colours and to hold your painting up at a distance so that you see it as it should be seen. One always forgets to do this. Not having had any formal art training it was a very exciting experience and a huge learning curve. I hope you like the results!

A late summer visit to the spectacular Noordhoek Beach on Cape Town’s Atlantic coast, for a walk with the dog, produced an unexpected bonus. We saw a photographer with a long telephoto lens staring out to sea for ages and wondered what he was trying to photograph. After much searching we spotted a large school of dolphins frolicking in the bay. Out came the Cannon camera. Thank goodness for its built in 12 times optical zoom, a very effective image stabiliser and a convenient large rock to lean against. Even with these aids capturing the fast moving Dolphins was challenging! At full zoom your field of view is tiny and the Dolphins unpredictable.

After a bottle of wine and the most divine bread rolls, apple, lettuce and gooey Camembert in the sun we still managed to photograph my latest addition, Mikey, another product of the Kirstenbosch shoot. How I love the energy, the vitality, the inquisitiveness and spontaneity of a two year old!

This is the first of many possible pictures from the photo shoot I did at Kirstenbosch.

This post is a little different in that the photographs are “wildlife” pictures taken in the small seaside town of Hermanus about an hour and a half’s drive from Cape Town. The first picture was taken quite some time ago using our pretty basic Fuji film Finepix 2 mega-pixel camera with its rather limited 3 X optical zoom. If we had had the newer Cannon S3IS camera with us on that visit we would have been able to do a lot better but the pictures we did get show just what a wonderful place Hermanus is for whale watching. The picture of a Southern Right Whale posted here was taken from the cliffs near the old fishing harbour. This is no longer functioning as a working harbour but has been preserved as a monument and tourist attraction. Close by is a rather unique restaurant, Bientang's Cave Seafood Restaurant, which has been built into centuries old cave in what is probably the best land-based whale watching area in the world. Imagine being able to watch these wonderful creatures fro...

Wow!!! I did a photo shoot of two kids aged seven and two at Kirstenbosch on Monday. Firstly I haven't been to Kirstenbosch for years and my, one forgets how beautiful it is. We used to go there often for Sunday champagne breakfasts and a walk with the kids. That was in the days when it was a lot less costly to get in! Hell of a price it is now and not something I will do that often - wonder what the price of an annual ticket is? I must look that up. I took Bryan's camera, a Canon Power Shot S3IS with 12x optical zoom and 6 mega pixels, as well as my own little Fujifilm Fine Pix with a 3x optical zoom and only 2 mega pixels. I have never done portrait photography before but jumped in headfirst. Well I was very excited and nervous and oh boy, one forgets how active a two year old is! After about two hours I left not knowing what I had in the bag. Getting home we put all the photos onto the computer. I had used Bryan’s camera for most of the shots. What a beautiful camera! I don...