Hello internet.
Where do we start? I think geographically would make good sense. I'M HOME!!! Back in my zone in the Mother City AKA Cape Town. What a stoke to be where I belong again… Been way too long since I walked on the beach barefoot in the warm, white sand and smiled to myself marvelling at the trivial yet beautiful details life has to offer. I have been doing this fairly often as I have been surfing and bodyboarding almost everyday since I have been home nearly 3 weeks now, and in order to get from the car park down to the waters edge, you have to walk along the warm, white sand. Some times life just hands you these nuggets and it feels like smiling is the most gracious way to say thanks.
So much to get out here, and I have been fairly slack with the whole blogging thing lately, that is not to say that I have been slack with the whole shooting thing, this is definitely not the case. In fact it is the polar opposite, I have shooting more than I can actually handle. I have shot plenty, and now I also sit with copious amounts of unedited pictures and only more and more ideas pouring out of my inspirationally saturated mind. Its literally like a downward spiral that is terminally growing at a frightening rate. However, the minutely sensible side of me has decided to take a stand against this process and start dealing with this apparent "problem" by getting my ducks in a row and churning out some pictures. Hopefully this will even out the scales in the right direction again. I take comfort in the fact knowing that I am getting somewhere now, but yet the problem will always remain the same, the one things that is absolutely essential in this line of work and has become a personal philosophy of mine over the last few months as well, consistency. Just got to keep on keeping' on.
Some times I have the intricate, elaborate and exquisite ideas that lead to beautiful images. I love exploring, developing and entertaining ideas and concepts that will challenge norms and standards that I have learned to accept and that I have become used to. Other times I can be just as happy shooting something simple and classic that will give me just as beautiful pictures. I have been playing a lot and experimenting with some things that have been yielding cool and different results. Instead of getting mad creative and throwing colours, textures and tones around, its just trying something different like maybe cutting a light modifier apart and putting it back together differently to try out something new, shooting with a different number of lights to what I am used to, shooting a different style of lighting, the list goes on and on, but basically I have gone back to basics and tried to make the changes all on my side of the camera before I get into post production. I love this as it reminds me that photography is a craft like being a carpenter or someone that one has to know their tools well in order to be a master at their craft.
For a while I got out of the style I was shooting, started shooting different things, looking at different photographers' works, following different people, looking for inspiration in different places and generally trying to do things differently. I thought I had progressed and broken through to a new tier of being a super shit good photographer or a good super shit photographer. However this was not to be the case, I ended up going through a very brief and and rapid change of styles in a very short period of time. This all sort of happened subconsciously as I did not even realise it until I had seen the three last sets of pictures I had shot and seen the clear resemblance between all of them. Whatever, I just happy to be shooting and seemingly learning more and more and getting "better". I guess better is a bad word here, but I feel like I am progressing, I don't think one photographers work can be better or more right than another's, I think this comes down to personal taste and I don't really think that ones taste can ever be up for discussion. I love editorial photography, but not so much wedding photography, even though I give wedding photographers mad props for doing what they do. And you can fuck right off for trying to tell me that editorial photography is not as good as another style of photography. I guess this leads back to one of my favourite editorial photographers, and if you read this blog often, you will have seen his name here before, Mr Zack Arias. What a dude. What a fucking dude. Zack, if you ever happen to stumble across my humble offerings by some sliver of chance, here it is man, your work is the shit. You are the business and a large part of the reason I keep shooting pictures. I aspire to shoot the jobs you are turning down. For real.
For those of you that are familiar with Zack's work, I guess you can see that I am influenced by him and have often drawn inspiration for my own shoots from his work.
I went through a stage where I wanted to shoot just like him, not exactly, but as closely as possible without looking like a cheese. After a while and with much resented influence from the fashion industry, I sorta went rogue and just started shooting things the way I saw them and wanted them to be. I was really happy at one point that I thought I had managed to break out of this mould I had placed myself in, but then these Ariasesque flashbacks starting showing up throughout my sets and I could tell I was not really moving forward in the direction I wanted to. This is probably when I also went through my "fuckit I don't want to shoot" phase, which incidentally tied in with the "weather is complete balls and I am depressed and not amped to shoot" phase. This kinda threw me a bit as I just kept on going and shooting little jobs here and there and then spending a lot of time working on my personal projects, some of which were torn to pieces by some fucking ridiculously dim witted people that I foolishly allowed myself to work with. Moving along swiftly though, I have been refining my personal work like a finely tuned and caringly crafted Islay whiskey. The results are quite pleasing and I am looking very forward to shooting the Cape Town leg of these projects which will be slightly more "exciting". Exciting fits quite well here as generally where there is a chance you may be, shot to death, stabbed to death, raped to death or killed to death in shape, form or mean a fair amount of excitement is usually involved. I won't give too much away at this stage, but Im going to be exploring the grittier, untamed side of South Africa in order to showcase the shit that isn't so glamorous and/or fabulous.
So things are coming along at a fair pace at the moment, starting to make progress on various things, networking with various agencies, getting a team together, planning out some shoots, making deals and doing favours and service trade's with various people. Possibly my favourite part about all this is the location scouting. My word are we blessed in terms of diversity and rad places to make beautiful pictures here in Cape Town. Another thing that makes life all the more pleasant in the whole scheme of things down here is the amount of light we have, and not just shit, flat, grey light, but amazing, warm, flattering light. Really spoilt for amount of usable hours to get out of the day.
Ok, enough nonsense for the mean time, here are some pictures I shot for the sake of being active and doing something cool for the sake of doing it. The model in question is from on of my local agency's in Trondheim, Trend Models. This set ties in with the last set of headshot's I posted, I eventually managed to get my shit together and find the colours, tones and feel I wanted, which also happened to not be any of the other ones I had played with before either, typical. Enjoy and check in soon again. Cheers, N.
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