It’s a tough decision to choose which one portrait eventually makes the site. Here is a selection of portraits I’ve shot so far.

Please take a look at the site, portraitofanation.co.za

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

The Photographer, Dustin Humphrey is represented by a Production House in California called Reel Sessions.

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.

Fashion photographer Poalo Roversi says, “Your photographic style comes from your creative expression, from your aesthetic, from the beauty that you can bring to the image, the emotion that you can give to the people who are looking at your work”. But I think you can only really attribute a style to somebody’s work by looking back over a decade or two of shoots. Style is perhaps retrospective. For now, I have a work in progress definition. A style is they way you work with people and incorporate new ideas and influences. It’s your perspective, a photographers point of view. A style is your approach to your work, how you try new things, and how you manage an initial idea to create something beautiful in the final artwork. A style is possibly not intrinsic to your work but intrinsic to your personality.