It’s been a long couple of weeks, I’ve been (figuratively) chained to the desk in the basement working on albums and doing the post on what seems like millions of photos. Two of my cameras broke while shooting a wedding – the two batteries on the big black camera’s battery grip literally shot out, snapping the hooks and the housing – fortunately I had backup cameras, but that would account for my dry wit at Avianto. After many phone call and trips to Kayalami, the local Nikon repair center and I are finally seeing eye to eye as to who should be paying for the repairs. Anyway, it’s been a while so I figured a bit of an update on what is going on in the studio is in order.

Nicola and John’s album, they’re the baobab guys, was nominated for an album award. After speaking to Nicola we decided not to submit it, I’m not really big on photography competitions, but it was nice to get recognition for a really cool album. I don’t think I posted anything from that album so a quick couple.

I also finished Swathi and Andrei’s killer bee Mauritius album.

I even finished Shelley and Marc’s Shepstone Gardens album (some from that one later this week, after they get a chance to see it). I did find this cool birdcage pic amongst the images – I’ve been having a Eugenio Recuenco week, so it may just be me that loves this pic.

We also opened a couple of dates in Jan, March and May due to cancellations for those that are still looking. I did send out mails to everyone who asked to let them know if anything changed. I’m also in the process of investigating switching back to the traditional albums from the storybook, coffee table books, and am in talks with a local bookbinder to make me a custom sample album.

Also really getting into Hendrik Kerstens’ portraits.

Way too many fantastic spreads from this one. A typical Dullstroom winter’s day, all grey, misty, roaring fires inside, chandeliers. Just altogether amazing.

Well, the website seems to have vanished today due to some issues at our hosting provider, so I’m setting this up via an automated update tool, which should post it as soon as the website is back up. The studio will be closed until the 15th, I’m off to write my exams and spend a couple of days in Cape Town recovering from the last six months of wedding photography – I’m not as fit as I used to be.

A quick sneak peek of Melissa and Steve’s album which I’ve just finished, hopefully once I’m actually online I can upload all these albums fairly quickly. I’ve already posted so many images from this wedding that I’m only going to post a couple of pages from the pre-wedding section of the day. It’s my favorite part of the day, everyone is excited and nervous and there is so much energy and emotion.

All this time off from the internet and email has had me putting together a serious amount of album pages. Putting together albums is the flipside of photographing weddings. Most people can pull together one or two great photos from a wedding, add a lot of photoshop and you can easily get a couple of killer pics from a wedding to post on a blog. The trick comes from photographing a wedding for an album; you need to shoot sequences, images that fit together, narrate a story, give an idea of what the wedding was about. It’s why I always tell my clients at their consultations that the photography has to be a collaboration between the photographer and the couple.

Anyway, just wanted to show off some pages from Thandi and Tom’s wedding. It has one of my favorite double pages ever. It’s a 60 page Asuka btw.

btw I’ve been listening to a lot of Vampire Weekend, really cool rock band with some reggae touches. Reminds me a lot of The Clash if they had grown up in Joburg and immigrated to London. Check out Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa, or The Kids Don’t Stand A Chance.

Just finished uploading Celia and Hugh’s album – a two volume Asuka set, 80 pages in total. Just thought I’d show off some pages before we head out for the long weekend. We’ll be back on Saturday.