Epic song by Alphaville, “Victory of Love”

Video shot and edited (with much love) by me.

The Cops were having a field day. All the toys were out. White SAPS choppers, railway ladder operation trucks, polished 9mm’s, flashing blue lights. Very eager to protect us, The Public. While scouting the previous day, I had a traffic cop chasing me down the N2 screaming and waving his wad of pink love slips like a Father screaming at that bratty child who opened the Christmas presents early. “A thousands Rands Fine, a thousands Rands fine… maaan! It’s Daaaangerrris”, in that flat Skottle-Vlei accent which is particularly Western Cape.

There’s a tented VIP area, with a fat gold PEPPER 1 Bentley park in front. The Media are hushed around to their side pen through the crowds. So many people and so many cameras. The Media are an interesting bunch. There’s a hierarchy. There’s are street rules. Actually, one main rule. The More SH*T you have, the more respect you get. It’s the same at the Fashion shows. Film and TV guys are at the top. Reels, generators, cabling, DOP’s, Focus-Pullers and Producers get you two things: 1. The Best Shot. 2. Respect. One step down the ladder are the magazine and newspaper photographers, who arrive early and squeeze their heavy Manfrotto tripods in between the Film crews, staking out their 3 square feet of Holy Land. It’s against the rules to talk or be friendly, unless it’s to your own production team. Then there are the amateur photographers, with enough clips, padded lens pockets, ring locked ND filter thingy’s and spare polarizers to start a home-based eBay. You just know this shot is going to be mandatory dinner table conversation for the rest of the school week. Last on the list are the bloggers, the YouTubers and the New Media freelancers, some dressed in wizard outfits. The old school media crowd know nothing about this new generation of weird and wonderful new media journos and generally give them little regard, letting them do what they want. We line along a long grassy wet bank, an inconvenient angle to the Towers. Some half-lost blond assist commits that horrible act of walking (with a Point and Shoot! the arrogance!) in front of the Camera line-up and a mass of burly bearded men roar and wave her down. There we stood, the crowds of Cape Town behind, huge outdoor speakers booming prison stories and quips about explosives and gangstas. Robbie “On Time, Every Time” Ross tells us how the towers would crumble gently helped by a few hundred kilos of explosives. Local residents clamber onto tin roofs.

4 minutes to go. The rain starts beating, I wrap a scarf around my camera to stop the streaming downpour, indecisively switching between 200 / 320 / and 400 shutter speeds and tweeting furiously. The Sun drifts in and out of the clouds, messing with my exposures.  And suddenly those towers come falling. A few cheers, waving arms. A swamp of shutters clicking.

A side Note: The power of twitter technology amazing. The original twitpic I shared 2 hours after the blast has now close to 4000 views and was retweeted over 230 times.

Elgin is a small corner of the Cape that was left untended, unnoticed. Elgin to most people was the Farmstore you stopped off to get snacks on the way up to Plett or Hermanus. A previously liquidated farm turned into opportunity by the business and design savy Duo that brought you Grand Daddy, Old Biscuit Mill and Daddy Long Legs. They’re connecting a piece of forest with some of cape town finest creatives, wielding some strong ideas on environmental design and micro-business in the process. It’s a subtle but slick operation. I didn’t want to leave. Sitting back on the pool deck, sipping an ice cold Grolsch swingtop and watching the afternoon soak up the last of the week. Feeling like I’ve tasted another slice of Cape Town heaven.

Off the top of my head, some names that were involved in Old Mac Daddy: Coly Porter Bell, Groslch, Biblotique, Room 13, The architect Greg Scott (from Greg Wright Architects). Mark Stead (&Co) and Pelican & Peony.  I didn’t get to see all the Airstreams. Apparently they’re getting 100 calls a day.

twitter: @oldmacdaddy
web: www.oldmacdaddy.co.za

Music: Radiohead – Hunting Bears.

6 weeks later it arrived. A brown envelope of stacked prints back to back. Eight 3x4s, Four 6x4s, Two 8x10s. I think mom got the family discount package. You had to cut them out one by one. And there it hung in golden framed innocence, my Portrait on the Wall. Of course I was the youngest, so I was under Janine and Clare and next to Bronwen. My three older sisters. There we hung staring over the family for an unchanging 10 years. From time to time, re-aligned. But there we were. On the wall. The photographed four.

There’s a crunchy mix of hi-brow and low-brow sponsors. Moet & Chandon flirts with the Auto-Quip Tyres. Grit and glory. White collar boxing is for guys with daytime jobs. The evening fights begin with an Industrial designer punching Graphic Artist. A tough but palatable match. By the end of the evening the old masters feud with real blood to spill between them. Uppercuts, hooks and fancy footwork represented by Greenside Johannesburg. We sip our carling draft and debate weight categories. Girlfriends are few. Beer is plentiful.

Follow @armourytweets on twitter

I also shot the portrait of Rui “The Rooster” Esteves in the Armoury for Portrait of a Nation.

Maybe I’m getting older. The kind of age where a crafted review of shaving cream can really appeal to me. Whats missing from local mags is normally just plain good f*cking writing. This week I picked up a copy of Fantastic Man from Church in Speakers Corner. Besides the interview of one my favourite bands, Hot Chip, which first caught me, they also feature quirky lists like “Summer Plans – A Census of the Summertime Intentions and Plans of Gentlemen from around the World’. A pretentious but obviously wry poke on the readers view of themselves.

The magazine layout is beautiful and traditional. Stacked columns, straight laced Fonts and center-aligned headings printed dutifully on recycled paper. It reminds me of the private school tuition that I never had. I like their take on Masculinity. Their images define style more as an open ended morphing of colors, trends, cuts and personalities. A view that’s perhaps a hard sell in a country which has to remind itself to wear a collared shirt out to Tiger Tiger every Thursday night. Rather than epitomizing style as a manicured newly minted suit, there’s a knowing Old Money hidden between the pages. The kind of Old Money which maybe at times has no money. The choice of images flow with the writing, featuring subtle and thought-out photography. This issue had a fashion editorial for the ‘fuller figured’ man.

The Journalist Bob Colacello

Interview with Alexis Taylor from Hot Chip

Fashion Editorial for "men of quite Marvellous Shape"

Vacation 4. Malibu. Photography by Jeff Burton

But Photoshop doesn’t necessarily make for better images. It just makes them different. This is not always a good thing. There are many photographers who photoshop badly. Photoshop can be a an axe, hacking away the sumptuous subtlety of an image. Over-editing can make photographs surreal and jarring. Too punchy, too colorful, too contrasted, too bright, over-sharp. Photoshop can show a photographer trying too hard to fix an image that wasn’t very interesting in the first place. There are also some photographers who claim superior skills because they don’t use photoshop at all. But photoshop is such an integral part of the process of modern photography, to avoid it completely is like a writer trying to avoid spellcheck.

An essential questions remains: If everybody has access to the same photo-manipulation tools, the same scripted effects, the same youTube photoshop tutorials, etc, what makes one photographer better than another? It’s obviously not just the way they edit an image, but the whole way they handle an idea. The skill is still in their eye, their particular taste, their way of managing a visual process. It’s up to the photographer as director, shaper, storyteller to draw on visual cues and triggers, to balance and compose scenes intuitively, to use a range of equipment and lenses, to draw on rich narratives by casting the right people and choosing the right locations to create the emotion and power behind an image. Photography is a process, like design, engineering, sewing. Photoshop can help or hinder that process. It’s a tool not a solution.

At the moment all I have in my studio is a CD player. 3 chairs. 2 foam boards. A notebook crammed with sketch-ups. A backdrop. A tin of paint. A pile of Z cards. A whole lot of Beer. No bar fridge just yet. It’s a big risk. A new chapter in my career. Sometimes in life it feels harder not to take big leaps, but to consistently take all the little ones.

My new Studio is in Green Market Square, 2nd floor Namaqua House. Hopefully you’ll come and visit me.