Roddy's thoughts and pictures at the close of the day
Picture poems - that’s what I think these are best called - they are short poems in dialogue with a photo I have taken. I started off trying to make the words fit into a haiku/haiga format but found that was quite a challenge and detracted from the dialogue aspect that I have found very... Continue Reading →
I thought I would try something a little different with this Chronophotography sequence that I took last week. A Long Crested Eagle had been perching beyond the trees in the old orchard on our plot in Hogsback and eventually settled on a branch just behind the trunk of a dead eucalyptus tree. In spite of... Continue Reading →
Chronophotography - taking a sequence of images to portray motion - has been around since the mid-nineteenth century. More recently though Spanish photographer Xavi Bou has been making wonderful composite images of birds in flight: he calls them Ornithographies. My own experiments with this style started in early 2020 at the start of the COVID-19... Continue Reading →
Pep's unique style depends on the photographer circling the subject and taking images from all sides before combining them in post processing to form a composite that keeps the recognisable characteristics whilst producing a shimmering, ghostly effect. I like it because you make an image that is both distinct and indistinct at the same time: anchored... Continue Reading →
One big problem with the energy crisis is visualisation. I keep reading names and figures but until they have a geographical context I can't really understand the problems. So I've put on my Geography Professor Emeritus hat, sourced appropriate data from Eskom and done some GIS work to establish: Where are the power stations; How much... Continue Reading →
Cloudscapes have always been one of my photo passions and lately I've been extending my skills using the Olympus Live Composite mode. These dawn and dusk shots of the Hogsback skyline from Wild Fox Hill are the longest I've taken. They're 15 minutes of one second exposures, so each picture is a composite combining 900... Continue Reading →
Every few years the Government does its best to wreck the legal and economic life of Makana by proposing to move the High Court to Bhisho. In the mid 1990s I assisted the fight to keep the court here with some maps and population data that showed Makhanda (what was then Grahamstown) to be the... Continue Reading →
I was very pleased with the reception to the Juxtaposed Dalarna Landscapes posted previously and that's inspired me to try something similar with the work in the Hogsback gallery I have already published. Hogsback Juxtaposed: SuperMoon Rising In the Dalarna landscapes there's lots of potential to juxtapose images on top of the reflections of the... Continue Reading →
Every once in a while I'll return to one of my lifetime's passions - making maps. This post is about one of the biggest mapping problems. If you look either at the header to this post or some of the beautiful maps of South Africa's river networks they give the impression that the region is... Continue Reading →
This is something different. In July 2014 I had my first experience of plant sound - it was Dan Fox’s installation ‘Harmonica Botanica’ at the Cragside gardens in Northumberland. I just loved the concept and sensation of hearing a laurel plant grow. Eight years have passed since then but I recently discovered - to my... Continue Reading →
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