Heat and Dust
Zebra on the road to the Etosha Salt Pan
Working back through the photo archives is a kind of excavation, an archeological dig, uncovering places and events from long ago, and learning all over again the old adage, that the past is another country - yet at the same time, it ain’t over yet, it isn’t even past, to misquote Faulkner for the second time this year.
So here is a link to my latest excavation, Heat and Dust, a portfolio of photographs from a trip to the Etosha National Park in Namibia, in 2016. My son had just got married, in Franschoek near Cape Town, to a lovely English lass who hails - history and archeology again - from precisely the same neck of the woods, the English Midlands, that my grand-parents immigrated to South Africa from more than a hundred years ago.
Rob and I flew out from Toronto for the wedding, and after the nuptials and celebrations were concluded, flew on to Windhoek, in Namibia, where we hired a 4x4 and drove north, to the Etosha National Park and the vast, shimmering expanse of the salt pan.
The Salt Pan, Etosha National Park, Namibia
Looking back over these photographs - and working them up into a portfolio - has brought back good memories, for sure - though it has also exposed, too clearly for comfort, technical weaknesses and flaws that I hope subsequent experience and practice have reduced somewhat.
It would be nice to be able to blame my equipment - I have a better camera and better lenses now than I had then - but that would be too easy a cop-out. The conditions, though, did have something of an impact, I suspect - the dust, hanging in the air, the rippling heat haze, so that the air and the light seemed at times like a kind of muslin, filtering the scene. But again, a more skilled and experienced photographer would have done better.
In fact, the mistakes I made were pretty basic - let me mention just three, for those of you who are photographers, and/or who photograph (or want to photograph) wildlife.
First, I had the focus mode on my camera set for most of the time to ‘area focus,’ thinking this would average out the foreground and middle ground and keep everything in focus. In theory this made sense, as the light was so bright and I could use a small aperture, giving me a large depth of field.
A wave of springbok
In practice, however, this led to too many soft images. What I should have done, and nearly always do now, is to use spot focus, and focus on the eyes of the subject. If the eyes are in focus, the whole image appears sharp - or at least, those parts of the photograph that matter. Though there are times, of course, where you might prefer things to be in soft focus, to create a mood, or a sense of movement. As in the photograph above - is the soft focus here a deliberate intention, or am I making a virtue of necessity? And in the wider scheme of things, does this matter? The image is what it is, right?
Second, I consistently under-exposed my low-light photographs. This meant that what should have been a fabulous series of images - I have dozens of photographs of two rhinos competing after dusk for dominance over the Halali waterhole - are effectively unuseable. Fine for sharing with family, maybe, but not for public consumption. Looking at those images, I could kick myself for the lost opportunity!
And finally, I guess, I made the classic amateur error - firing away at everything, and taking too many boring and repetitive photographs.
It is difficult, of course, with a subject like wildlife, where things can change in an instant, to always be sure what will happen, or even if you will see such a subject again, especially when you are driving yourself, in your own vehicle, and don’t have the luxury of a game vehicle and a game ranger to take care of the driving and commentating and to leave you free to concentrate on your image-making.
Still, a more mindful, patient, selective approach, where you try to foresee what the final image will look like, and to imagine what kinds of images you want to create, are infinitely preferable to the ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ approach of the rank amateur.
Gemsbok, Etosha National Park
And yet, despite these shortcomings, something comes through that I think is worth sharing, at least in this selection of images. Part of that something is precisely the thickness of the light, the blinding quality of the landscape - the heat and the dust - and the sense of the wild animals who inhabit that zone as part of the landscape and environment, that I write about in the introduction to the portfolio.
So, with that, here is an invitation to see for yourself, and let me know what you think. Just press the button!
As always, your comments and feedback are truly appreciated.
Dog-Faced Boy Watchdog, 2021. Analogue Collage, Roberta Pazdro
Dog-Faced Boy, and other collages
As many of you know, Rob (my wife, for those of you who don’t know her) is an accomplished collage artist, whose work has appeared in shows in South Africa and the UK. You can see her on Instagram, at @robrob_pazdro.
This piece, Dog-Faced Boy Watchdog, is one of her most popular. One of a limited edition of 10, the piece was exhibited in Johannesburg, and an enlarged print was purchased by the Founder of the Turbine Art Fair, one of the major Art Fairs in South Africa.
My next blog (or, failing that, the blog post after that) will feature a guest artist piece by Rob, showing a range of her work and talking about why she collages and her approach to her work. So do look out for it!
News update - Glasgow Gallery of Photography
Last month I mentioned that a photograph of mine had been accepted by the Glasgow Gallery of Photography for an exhibition of landscape photography.
I am thrilled to add that a second photograph has since been accepted, again by the Glasgow Gallery, for another exhibition, Winter, which will show in April.
I will share the links to the online galleries once these are available. Even better, if you are in Glasgow, pop in to the Gallery and see the shows in person!
Travel Plans
There may or may not be blog posts in March and April - towards the end of next month, Rob and I fly out to South Africa for a big family reunion, and I will have to see if I can find time to write and to post.
This trip will be the first time that all three of my children and all five of my grandchildren, from three continents and countries - Canada, South Africa and the UK - will be together at the same time and in the same place. The youngest of the grandchildren - Sebastian (UK) and Olivia (SA) will be meeting their uncles and aunts and cousins for the very first time, which should be quite an adventure.
We will spend about a week together in Langebaan, two hours or so up the West Coast from Cape Town, braaing (barbecuing, for you non-South Africans), lolling about in the sun, going for walks on the beach, and generally having a good time. The pretext for all this is my 70th birthday - although my actual birthday is only in August, the period around Easter was the time that everyone agreed would work best - you have no idea of the complexities of juggling school holidays and leave across so many countries and workplaces.
From Langebaan, Rob and I will drive just a bit further up the coast, to Paternoster, for a weekend which will include lunch at Gaaitjie, an old fisherman’s cottage perched above a cove and looking out over the ocean, one of our favourite restaurants in SA. Rob and I took my mom to Paternoster on holiday for a few days, not long after we returned to South Africa at the beginning of my European Union contract, and treated her (and ourselves) to lunch at Gaaitjie. Ever since then we have just loved the place.
From Paternoster we head back to Cape Town, to spend a couple of days in Kalk Bay with my son and his family from the UK. We will have another ten days or so after this, to spend time with my mom (91 years old and not a day over 80) and to visit old haunts (the wine farms, the restaurants, the seaside walks) before flying out, in the third week of April, to Amsterdam.
We have two-and-a-half days in Amsterdam, before we fly on to spend a week or so with good friends in Germany. Plans are still being discussed, but whatever we end up doing it will be great to see them and we know we’ll have a good time.
All in all we’ll be away for almost five weeks, and I suspect that processing photographs, and writing up these blogs, will not be top of the agenda, at least not until we get back to Toronto and have settled back in.
Still, you never know, so keep an eye on your mailbox!
Who wants a free gift? Not us Canadians!
Rain over the Maluti Mountains
In last month’s blog I offered a free print of ‘Rain over the Maluti Mountains’ to anyone in Canada who wrote in to ask for it. The response from my Canadian friends and family - precisely nothing! Zip, nada.
So I offered it again, this time on Facebook and Instagram. Again, from the vast Canadian emptiness, silence. But I did get some enthusiastic responses, from friends in the US, Australia and England - the warm response from my old friend Susan, in the UK, was especially persuasive. So, even though I had said, initially, that the offer of the print was only good in Canada, I changed my mind, and the print will soon be on its way to Susan and a comfy home in England.
So what is it, about the lack of response from my fellow Canadians? Somehow you missed the message? Or you were too polite to stick your hand up? You don’t like free stuff? Or you just plain dislike my photographs?!
Do let me know. I’m curious!