Following the light in photography and life
I wrote in a previous post about fulfilling a long-standing wish of my mother’s, to visit the little fishing village of Paternoster, on the Cape West Coast: most of the time was family time, an extended celebration of her 87th birthday, but on the last morning I made sure I had some time for myself.…
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Here is one final image from our family get-together in Clarens in the Free State – a landscape.
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I was out in the evening, and up early in the morning, as I observed in my last post, chasing the light in the Drakensberg, hoping for something dramatic. What the ‘berg gave me instead was a picture of calm, of light peaceably moving over a silent landscape, as the slow world turned. In the…
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With the Natal Midlands behind us, we headed west, toward the northern Drakensberg, for the final three nights of our holiday meander. We’d booked ourselves a cottage at the Berg House, high on a hillside overlooking the magnificent Amphitheatre in the distance, up a winding dirt road that twisted and climbed and simply called out…
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The Midlands Meander in KwaZulu Natal – well, meanders, criss-crossing the N3 that links Johannesburg to Durban, offering the traveller a network of scenic routes that winds through hills and valleys as it folds into its embrace potteries and chocolatiers, breweries and cheese-makers, leather workers and artists. It is the land of dairy – and,…
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Two sets of gates on Beverley Farm, in the Dargle Valley; two interpretations. The one gothic, the other more bucolic. The landscape shows the Karkloof, where we spent a lovely morning hiding in bird hides, on a farm, hoping for cranes.
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We left Johannesburg on the last Saturday in July, around ten o’clock, for a much-needed break – five nights in the Natal Midlands, followed by three nights in the Drakensberg. The traffic was light, the day was sunny, the wind was at our backs as we drove across the highveld, stopping at Harrismith for lunch,…
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There are two new dads in our immediate family – my two sons-in-law, Shaun and Gareth. Fathers Day this year was the first for both of them, and I wonder what went through their minds, about their new status in life, their new roles and responsibilities. Or did they simply shake their heads in wonder…
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When you come to a fork in the road, take it, said Yogi Berra – and if that isn’t a piece of advice befitting Samuel Becket and Waiting for Godot I don’t know what is. Kinda sums up the existential dilemma. Problem is, we live our lives forwards, not backwards, so we never know whether…
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The eye picks up patterns everywhere; pattern, lines, composition are the basic elements of a halfway decent photograph, along with (especially in black and white images) form and texture. Look beyond pattern, however, and what you see is signs: not necessarily symbols, which are more potent, and harder to create, but the signs – literal,…
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For fifteen years, maybe longer, our friend Chris has been the organizer and convenor of an annual pumpkin carving. For the past couple of years, this has taken place at the farm she and her partner Paul live on in the hills above Bailieboro, overlooking Rice Lake. Friends drive up for the day from Toronto,…
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Three black and white images of the morning fog on Seneca Lake in upstate New York. These might be my favourites, of the lake images…
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