ALMA

I met Alma quite coincidentally. She was waitressing at a farm restaurant that I visited during the December holidays. From the minute I saw her I knew I wanted to photograph her. To my surprise, Alma has never modeled before. She's a total natural in front of the camera. We spent an afternoon exploring a farm and shooting some pics. These are some of the resulting images. I'm looking forward to working with her on a styled shoot in the very near future. Watch this space for more of this beautiful girl! 

A huge thank you to Nacht Wacht for letting us shoot in this beautiful setting.

[Featured Work] Billabong Girls Winter 2013

This year I've been fortunate enough to do quite a bit of work with the beautiful Billabong Girls, Tarryn Chudleigh and Tanika Hoffman. I absolutely love doing work for the Billabong brand and working with these talented girls, in and out of the surf. Here are just some of the published shots from the Winter 2013 clothing range. Will share some more soon on my Facebook page. 

P.S. Join the Billabong Girls South Africa Facebook Page to keep up-to-date with the latest pics and news from all their gorgeous team riders.

Unhappy Birthday

And now for something COMPLETELY different. Even though I love to shoot - and mostly do shoot - surfing, my favourite thing to photograph is people. I was playing around with a bunch of concepts around the theme of environmental portraits. Well, actually, I wanted to turn the theme of an environmental portrait on its head and do environmental contradictions. These images are far from perfect so I prefer to look at these as a test shoot. I'll hopefully get to redo them in a proper studio set-up sometime soon. The models were all friends of mine and I must really give them credit for their fun and comfortable attitude towards the shoot. All the below are shot with a Canon 1000D and kit lens (taken back in 2009 in my garage).

Friday Favourite - Stepping Stones

Here's today's Friday Favourite - a once-off shot from my archives posted (almost) every Friday. Titled 'Stepping Stones', this was a spontaneous shot that I took back in 2008 of a friend of mine, Lauren, crossing a stream of water on the beach. I desaturated it slightly to give it a more muted & moody feel (especially because the weather was overcast and grey), and added a vignette. This image has special significance to me because it reminds me how far I've come as a photographer. Pursuing photography as a career definitely entails numerous 'stepping stones' along the way and when I look at the images in my archives it's always great to see the progress I've made along the way.

If you have any questions about my photographs, please feel free to ask me.

Surf(able) - SSA Extreme Abilities Adaptive Surfing Day 2011

Saturday was World Disability Day and I was fortunate enough to shoot the Surfing South Africa Extreme Abilities Adaptive Surfing Day at Big Bay. Basically it was an event to provide people with disabilities the opportunity to surf. It was such a fun day and exceptionally well organised (well done to Tasha Mentasti, Dries Millard and the rest of the team). I have never seen more smiles in my life - everyone was just stoked. Some of these guys have never felt what it's like to ride a wave (imagine that)...see the pics below for the smiles that resulted.

For the full press release visit this link and for more of my photos from the day go here. 

Shiraz Sunday

This past weekend a group of friends and I headed up to Riebeek Kasteel for the annual Shiraz & Art Festival. Every year we do a "blend your own Shiraz" event hosted in the cellars of Riebeek Cellars wine. It is so much fun. The lighting is shocking in the cellar (as you can imagine). So I decided to convert the pics into black and white and treat them a bit because the colour ones are far too grainy. If you get the chance, do this event next year. We each took a way a bottle of our very own blend.