Stadium, Durban, South Africa

Lots of people photograph iconic architecture, so the challenge is to try and see it a bit differently. Stadiums are about people, they contain spectators - and people move into them before events, and out of them after events. And in-between, there isn't much movement, so they sit there like big UFO's.

So movement is a nice thing, here with a single solitary girl, dead-still on her mobile phone for some balance to the image. Maybe she couldn't find someone, or maybe they never came.

Moses Mabhida Stadium, Durban - the iconic stadium built for the Soccer World Cup 2010, Nikon D700, June 2012

Surprise!

Coming home to a surprise in the evening is quite a delight, and so it was when I found our bed scattered with balloons.

Photography is about memories and moments that have already occured, and I wanted to somehow record this lovely moment, so I spent quite a bit of time photographing the bed and the balloons at different angles. But none of them worked. I think I was trying too hard!

So I went back to basics - what was the moment? What was the memory? Was it the balloons on the bed? Not really, when you think about it.

It was actually the moment of surprise when you walk from a dark passage into a gently illuminated room and see the balloons - surprise is the moment when the usual is replaced by the unusual...

I think the image works nicely because it goes back to the basics of what it was all about. And in many ways photography does require some thought, and it's not always just a random clicking of buttons. But not too much thought, either!

{This was taken on the Canon G1-x, and as I have come to expect from this camera, it works well in low light and never lets me down. In fact, I normally add in some noise in Photoshop to give the image some texture. (Add noise, monochromatic, Gaussian, normally just 1 or 1,5)}

Back on the Streets with the G1-X

I'm really enjoying being back on the streets with the G1-X. It feels a lot safer to use on the streets than my big DSLR, especially in South Africa, and in the back alleys and small streets, where its often less than safe. It's nice to feel confident of image quality in a small camera. I'm mostly happy with it -I can live with the focus speed, I love the size and weight. As I've said before, it feels like a real camera. And few people actually notice it, which is nice.

I like to shoot in raw, so the one thing that really irks is that I cannot frame or view scenes on the LCD in black and white. The world looks different in black and white and it would have pre-visualised it as such.

There is quite a lot of mixed stuff in this post, from ladies doing lunch to the scary abortion posters that line the streets.

Tropical Point and Shoot Fun

Canon's IXUS300HS or Powershot4000 (as it's known in the US) is not the greatest of the ultra-compacts even if it looks pretty handsome. In fact, many of the recent compact cameras offer mushy and smeary images and seem to have taken a step backwards. However, sometimes you have to make the best use of what you happen to have with you, especially if it's all you have at the time. I think the layered nature of tropical plants and the contrasts in light and colour lent themselves best to the camera's inbuilt miniature effect, and detract from its lesser qualities. All in all, it was fun trying to work around the magnificence of this tropical greenery and achieve something that doesn't rely on technical perfection. I think the secret of owning a point and shoot at a time when some smartphones can work just as well, and when there are lots of larger sensor small cameras, is to either use them for simple family fun, or to try to do something a bit different with them. And they look a bit better when you click on them to make them bigger...

Waiting for the movies

I took this picture at the site of an old Drive-In cinema near Heilbron, a small rural town in the heart of South Africa. In the age of cable TV, DVD's and iPads, the drive in stands deserted literally as a dead skeleton, in a field, devoid of its flesh. Sad, in a way. I liked the Drive-In as a kid, all dressed in pajamas with popcorn in the back seat. Guess it's an age thing!

Both these images are the same. The first one has been traditionally processed, whilst the second had been given the Plastic Bullet treatment I used for the Italy images a few days ago on the blog. The second image looks as if it was a scene taken at the turn of the century and dug out of a museum archive.

Which do you prefer?

Man reading, Cape Town

Alternative Italy

One of the current photographic fashions is to process images in a style that imitates the plastic film cameras of an era gone by, and which have now been made available again in the form of the Lomo and a remake of the famous Diana Camera with its plastic lens and leaky light body. The popularity of this style has a new take in the age of the smart phone in the form of Hispstamatic, an app for the iPhone and Instagram which is an experience sharing platform with a built in processor which creates the leaky light bad exposure look, amongst others. Its all the retro rage right now.

It's probably a bit of a fad and a fashion, so provided one doesn't take it all to seriously, it can be a lot of fun. The Apple Macintosh application store has a similarly based piece of software called Plastic Bullet, the results from which you can see here. The intriguing thing about Plastic Bullet is that as you page through ever changing options and versions of your images you have to save them on the way, because once you have moved on there is no going back to one you might have previously liked, but not saved.

Anyhow, I have not really found the time to do the serious post processing of images from a recent visit to Italy, which included Rome, Florence, Bologna and Venice, but in a moment of whimsy, I did decide to run a few of them through Plastic Bullet. It was all rather fun, and the results are here for you to judge. The more serious output from that trip will go on my website at www.peterbendheim.com

They look more funky enlarged. Just click on them to do so. They were shot with the Nikon D7000