As many Cape Town photographers, will or should know the city is clamping down on public photo-shoots, requiring that photographers apply for permits to be allowed to shoot with models in public spaces, regardless of the nature of the shoot.

While I understand why the city wants to have control, the current system has a number of flaws, especially when it comes to non-commercial shoots with just a model and a photographer or a small team.

With the current process, we have to apply online, which I have no issue with in principal, however we can only apply during normal working hours, we need to specify a location and we need to wait up to 48 hours for the application to be approved.

This is an unacceptable and unworkable situation as many of our test and smaller shoots are last-minute and often require last-minute location changes.

There are only two options that I can see be workable.

1)      The first choice would be that small shoots with 4 or fewer people and minimal gear are exempt for requiring a permit to shoot but will need to comply with the following:

1. The City will publish a daily list of all “authorised” shoots which will have preference over small shoots with no permits.
2. These shoots will be listed as “no access”, “restricted access” or “ask permission” from the permit holder and all small shoots will need to comply with the conditions.

2)      This probably will not suit the city due to the requirement that the photographers need to have Public Liability insurance so the second option is that the city must provide a 7 day per week permit approval process, free of charge, with a minimal turnaround time, say not exceeding 12 hours. This option still restricts the freedom to change locations at the last-minute but I am sure we can learn to live with it.

If the issue is solely one of indemnity then why doesn’t the city start a certification process whereby photographers have to signup once a year for a city photo permit that give them Public Liability insurance through the city, indemnifies the city and will cost far less for the city to administer than the permit process they currently have in place?

Given that the City does not want to engage in debate with us over this I would suggest that we as Cape Town photographers organise a mass protest on one of the beaches and continue with these until the city adopts a workable system…

Update 30^th January 2012

This raising of this issue has received a lot of support from the Cape Town Photographic community during the last 24 hours discussions have raised the following points:

• Given the number of small and test shoots that happen during the week, the film office is going to be swamped if all small shoots are to be permitted and will not be able to cope with the load.
• Many of Cape town’s occupants use public spaces for activities like:
  • Cycling
  • Roller blading
  • Beach Cricket
  • Skate Boarding
  • Running
  • Playing with Frisbees
  • Flying Kites
  • Surfing
  • Kite surfing

Some of these activities pose a risk to the public but the participants are not required to register and produce proof of Public Liability insurance, so it is prejudicial to photographers to expect them to have to.

Update 2nd February 2012

I just spoke to the manager of the film office at the City of Cape Town and while the City has been consulting with professional bodies, like SAAP, these are production companies who do not represent or necessarily understand the needs of individual photographers. The City will not engage us individually so we need to form a association so that our voices are heard. In this light, I hereby launch the Cape Town professional Photographers Association.

Please email me on Email CTPPA and include the following:

That you wish to join the CTPPA and for it to appoint representatives to represent you by engaging with the City towards finding a workable solution to the film permit issue.

Please let everyone know about this as we need to start talking to the City now due to the fact that it could take months to change City policy.

This week something very disturbing occurred on twitter and it’s something as a South African male that I find very concerning.

I was going to post this to my private blog but I really felt it was important enough to go out publicly here on my website.

It all began with a very controversial and IMO misguided project called the Jugcam which was started by @followthebounce on twitter. The whole idea of this project was to look for and photograph girls with “Great Boobs” at cricket matches and then post the pics on twitter.

It was never intended that permission would be gotten from the girls, just that the pics would be posted and this would be fine. I do believe that @followthebounce has decided to get permission in future but…

Unsurprisingly, a lot of girls on twitter got really offended by the Jugcam and demanded it be stopped and it ended up with girls against guys with the girls taking a lot of abuse for their standpoint. Yes the whole issue is a complex one and there is a lot from both sides that needs to be considered here but right down underneath it all there was a very fundamental problem that arose and that is that it seems that a lot of of SA’s male population do not believe that woman have a right to complain when it comes to things like jugcam and should just shut up.

That’s quite a statement for me to be making but it’s clearly there in 140 character tweets and I know that many guys out there now regard me as public enemy number 1 but guys think about this, the girls said NO and what did most of you do? You didn’t listen to the NO, you didn’t take time to try understand why they were upset (and let’s face it, girls can be very complex but they also have feelings and opinions) in fact all many of you stared to do was hurl abuse at them, insult them and then do what many SA men seem so good at doing, beat them into submission, albeit in this case verbally and in packs. Yes some of the girls also started slinging mud but that was unavoidable seeing how some of them were being treated.

Some of the girls were called “over reactionary feminists” or “Feminazi’s” some far worse.

Some of the guys said things like how were we supposed to know its wrong or that girls would get upset but when the girls voiced this, many of those same guys just got pissed off.

Seriously guys, yes this article is going to piss many of you off but at the end of the day you have to go back and think about one word, NO.

It seems from this last week that we as South Africans have a huge problem with the word NO. SA girls for the most part are ignored when they use it and a lot of SA guys see it not as something that must be listed to, but rather as an opportunity to show their dominance and to just bully the girls into submission. There is a word for that and it’s not dominant, it’s called abusive!

OK as a guy what did you do last time your girlfriend said NO when it came to something. Be honest here because this is important and if you lie, it’s only yourself you are lying to.  Did you sit back and accept the NO, try understand why she was saying NO, or did you do your best to coerce or bully her into changing the NO to a yes? There is no one listening to your answer but you and you can try lie to yourself but then you will still know the truth deep down.

Guys, girls are so much more than just a set of legs with breasts attached and a great sex toy. Some of the guys reading this have already figured this out but I am sorry to say that it looks like many of you still need to discover the wonders of a female partner who you can appreciate for her mind as well as her body.

It’s quite simple and a lot of what’s currently happening to women in SA starts with us guys learning the meaning of NO and learning to respect it.

Just think what would happen if all of us SA men started to respect the women around us and started to respect NO. Think of how many less abused women there would be in SA and how many fewer girls there would be who were being bullied into having sex.

The Jugcam debacle was a perfect example where you as guys could have said, OK, we don’t know what the big deal is but we will respect that the girls don’t like it but unfortunately that didn’t happen.

Guys seriously whether you like it or not you need to work on being one of those guys that when they are asked, do you listen to your girlfriend and respect her wishes can without hesitation say YES.

As for the girls, you need to learn to stand up and make sure that NO means NO and that guys around you understand that you have a right to  an opinion and a right to voice it without being shot down for voicing it.

I am offering the first 3 Pinups from my new collection for sale. Two of them are unlimited prints and for the the third, even though its not a limited editon, I am only going to sell 10 of them, beyond that you will need to be on a very special list of recipients.

So here they are:

Drag Race

Printed on an HP Z3200 Archival Inkjet using HP Super Heavy Weight Pro Media.

Image sixe 90cm x 58cm

Availability – Unrestricted

R650.00

Kinky Kitty

Printed on an HP Z3200 Archival Inkjet using HP Super Heavy Weight Pro Media.

Image sixe 90cm x 62cm

Availability - Unlimited but only 10 being mae available for general purchase.

R650.00

Retro Pepsi

Printed on an HP Z3200 Archival Inkjet using HP Super Heavy Weight Pro Media.

Image sixe 90cm x 66cm

Availability - Unrestricted

R650.00

The above prices do not include transport or delivery.Email for enquires or orders

This shoot really came about because I wanted to do something cool as a sort of tribute to David Hobby aka Strobist and also I wanted to do something different for one of the shoots that would be featured on my soon to be released lighting DVD.

The image seems to be causing quite a stir and also I am getting lots of people asking how it was done so I thought I would share some of the behind the scenes in this post, the full behind the scenes with video footage etc will be on the DVD.

So it all begins like any good shoot with a plan.

When I plan a shoot I spend time really thinking through every aspect of it including things like wardrobe, set, lighting, props etc.

So let’s run through the checklist.

Costume

The costume was going to be the centre piece of the shoot and would actually double up for two shoots that I was going to do, Speedlight Girl and a mildly Fetish style pinup.

I found some references online and then handed them to Simone from Eden Wear to work her magic. I must say she exceeded expectations

As for props, all we really needed was a Tomb Raider style belt holding Speedlight pouches so not much to worry about here.

Set

The set is often something that gets overlooked, left till the end or composited in later but nothing beats having a proper background and not having to deep etch, especially if your model has light hair. Most people really don’t realise how easy it is to create a believable set and to fool a camera.

When I am designing a set I always begin with the background and I have built up quite a library of sites where I can purchase images that are licensed for use in this manner. For this shoot I decided on a moody balcony scene. Now it’s not a train smash if the background is a little pixelated when you blow it up to the size you need for the shoot because we can just blur it a little so we don’t see pixilation and let Depth of Field take care of the rest for us.

OK so we have the background but in real life scenes are not just a background, they include foreground and  more often than not, an image we uses doesn’t include a usable foreground for the model to stand on. This is where we get sneaky and remember that a camera cannot see 3D and we can use this to our advantage buy using something that has an illusion of texture.

If we look at the background image it looks like the ground is a rough concrete texture and the first thing that comes to mind for me is fabric. Yes you read correctly fabric and remember it doesn’t have to have actual texture, it just needs to fool the camera into believing it has texture.

As you can see from the following image, we have the background hung and the fabric stretched out on the floor. There is a little bit if a colour difference, a bump at the transition and a sudden change in texture but that will be easy to fix in post. The most important thing is that it looks believable.

Lighting

The final piece of the puzzle is lighting. I find that most people tend to come totally unstuck at this stage because really they panic and try over complicating everything. Again I start by going to actual locations or the web and looking at references, in this case comics and illustrations.

I pretty much decided on a 55cm beauty dish as my key light and where as I would normally start here, in this case I worked a little differently. I was using a paper print, not a translight for this shoot so I needed to light my background. At the same time I wanted rim lights to highlight my model which means I would have needed 4 lights unless I got clever.

By clever I mean using the same light to act as a rim light and a background light. A few people said it wouldn’t work because the rim light would need to be too powerful and would blow out the background and I theory they are right except that I was thinking inverse square law

So what do we know about inverse square law well its means that every time I double the distance between my lights and an object I get ¼ the power I have before. I this case I wanted my clip on the model to be around f/8 and the light on the background to be about f/5.6. This means all I needed to do was ensure that the distance from my light to the centre of the background was 50% great that the distance from the light to the model and because I wanted even lighting on the background, that the lights were approximately 45° to the background.

This is really where you want to use a light meter and low and behold, by adjusting the light so that I got f/8 on the model the background was pretty much f5.6. The lighting I used here was a mono light with a 2m strip box but no grid as I want the light to spill onto the background. So now that I had the basic set-up it was time to work from the front backwards.

Don’t try work with all your lights at the start, but rather turn on one light at a time so that you can see how your lighting is changing.

So starting from the front and working backwards. The front and in this case key light was an Elincrhom Quarda pack with a 55cm beauty dish. It was located above and in front of the model on a boom and adjusted to produce f/8. I could have used all Speedlight’s for this but continually fighting with Speedlights to get enough power really does distract you from just getting down to the job of lighting.

I knew before I even started that I would need bottom fill but I was only going to worry about that once I had moved onto the next set of lights which were the rim and background lights.

If you compare the two images, you can see how much extra light there now is on the face and that’s what I wanted to see before deciding on where and how high to place my fill lights.

So the fills, SB-900’s with bounce umbrellas at ¼ power were placed in front of the model, low down and at about 30° from the camera, still leaving good definition on the face but opening up the shadows under the nose, eyes and chin.

The final shot

So here we have the final shot out of camera.

I opted not to shoot with the Speedlight on to ensure I didn’t have to worry about flare and chose to rather add the light beams in later. A little bit of contrast, smoothing, and touching up the background and we have the final image. The important thing to notice is that most of the ground work for this was done in camera as IMO you can do a lot in Photoshop but great images already have most of what’s needed out of camera.

If you want to see more in-depth behind the scenes look out for my DVD “Its All About Light” that should be out mid January 2012

Well those who have tasted my biltong seem to be coming back for more, which is a good and a bad sign. It’s a good sign because as I suspected, they agree is better that the shop bought stuff but it’s a bad thing because it’s still reasonably expensive to make and I am not geared up for production and I don’t have the time to make it in bulk or sell it.

To this end I thought I would share my recipe so you can all start making your own. All you need is a Mellerware Biltong King that you can get from the likes of Yuppichef.

As far as the choice of meat goes, I feel rump is by far the best cut. You don’t need A grade rump, B grade will do because the marinating process will also tenderise it so its saves some money.

The rump should be cut into strip gutting with the grain. The thickness of the strips depends on whether you want fat or not. If you opt for lean biltong, cut the meat into strips about 1- 1.5cm . This will take around 2-3 days to dry.

If you like fatty biltong, cut the meat around 2cm thick so that there is extra drying time required which gives the fat time to cure properly, probably 3-4 days.

Making the biltong is really easy this makes around 4-6kg’s.

• Take about 100g coriander seeds and toast them.
• Take half ¾ of the seeds and crush them and grind the rest to a medium grind
• Mix the coriander with 280 grams of non iodated salt, 75g brown sugar, 30g bicarbonate of soda, tsp black pepper, ½ tsp white pepper, ½ tsp ground garlic flakes, ½ tsp ground mixed herbs
• Once all the dry ingredients are well mixed, place half of each in two larger freezer bags.
• Place the meat in the bags one piece at a time and ensure each piece is well coated.
• Mix 1 cup of apple cider vinegar with 3 table spoons of Worcestershire sauce, I use Holbrooks.
• Add 1/2 cup of good apple cider vinegar to each bag and wait till the mix stops foaming.
• I like to seal my bags so that I can rub the mix around regularly.
• Leave to marinate for 24 hours.
• After 24 hours remove the meat from the bags and wash in a mix of 50% apple cider vinegar and 50% boiling water that you have allowed to cool down.
• Pat the meat dry with paper kitchen towels and hang it up to dry in your biltong maker.

Make sure that fly’s do not come into contact with the meat at any stage… If you find your biltong is a little too salty, you can add less salt next time.

Once you have made the biltong, you can always freeze it in the unlikely event you don’t eat it fast enough

As many of you know by now I will be presenting two talks on the Nikon Stand at this years Photo & Film expo in JHB. What many of you don’t know is I have one free weekend pass that I am going to give away to the person that provides the best motivation as to why they should attend my Speedlight workshop, details below. We are going to keep it simple and all you have to do is motivate why you should get the ticked by commenting on this post.

And just to up the incentive, I will give you an extra hour one on one  after the speedlight talk

The decision as to who gets it will be totally at my discretion and I will announce who that person is, here on my blog on Tuesday before lunch time. Please pass this on to as many people as you can and also please re tweet this as you will see from below that its going to be a very interesting talk. This is for a single free ticket to the event and does not include airfare, accommodation or anything else other than the ticket itself.

Massimo manning his flaming pizza oven

I am sure many of you are no strangers to Massimo’s aka Pizzaclub in Hout Bay and if you are you definitely need to change this as you are missing out on something great.

I first came across Massimo’s on twitter because everyone I know seemed to be following them and talking about them. A little while later they were tweeting about wanting some photograph taken and I responded but it never really went anywhere.

Time passed and I found myself in Hout Bay with an Italian friend and we were looking for somewhere to go for lunch so I suggested we try Massimo’s. To say that we were impressed is an understatement and I believe that producing a pizza that will impress an Italian is no easy feat.

Massimo’s food is really good and unusually lives up to all the hype about it on twitter but what impressed me more as a photographer was the way the food looked so I convinced Massimo to let me do a shoot for him.

Massimo’s

So a bit about the restaurant before I get onto the food and the photography. Massimo is no stranger to food having grown up on his family’s small chicken farm in Piverone Italy. He and his wife Tracy started Massimo’s Pizza Club in the garden of their farmhouse in France in 2004 but fortunately for us they fell in love with Cape Town and opened the first local Massimo’s Pizza Club in January 2009 before moving to their current location in 2010.

They are currently located at the Oakhurst Farm Park in Main Road Hout Bay Massimo’s Website , in what is essentially a big brick barn but this hasn’t stopped Massimo and Tracy infusing it with their personal magic, turning it into a fun warm and inviting food destination. I must admit that I personally have a few favourite restaurants that I like to eat at and Massimo’s is now high up on that list and I will readily drive to Hout Bay to experience their food.

The Food

Massimo’s claims to believe in only using the best seasonal ingredients and one look at the food on your plate will more than back up these claims. Everything that gets put before you, wether it be a fresh colourful Caprese salad with Burrate and Avo or one of Massimo’s legendary pizzas with its bubbling thin crust and mouth-wateringly tempting toppings just screams quality and begs to be eaten.

Shooting this food let me really see the pride that Massimo has in his food and we were all very hungry while shooting but thankfully got to sample the food. So I am not going to say much more and will rather let the food do the talking.

I have been thinking a lot about my blog post from Sunday regarding the fact that great restaurants, like people you want to spend time with, have great personalities and I was thinking it would be really great to get you to tell us about your restaurants personality.

So I am challenging you to send me a description of your restaurants personality and why people keep coming back.

I am not looking for, “we have great food and a good atmosphere”, I want more and I want to see that you fully understand how to market the uniqueness of your venue. Be creative be descriptive but mostly be honest with us and yourself.

I will keep posting the best responses on a blog post and maybe even come up with a super prize for the best description received by the end of September.

An important part of the restaurant offering I have been focusing on is identifying what makes the restaurant unique in the marketplace. This has most probably been the single hardest component of the package because most restaurateurs don’t have the answer to this themselves.

Add to this the fact that some restaurants are just busy while others that should be aren’t and it’s quite a challenge to figure out.

About an hour ago, 4:15pm, I was sitting in Davinci’s on Kloof waiting for my pizza trying to figure out what makes this restaurant unique for the shoot we are doing there soon. It was cold, wet and pretty miserable outside and not surprisingly there were only 2 other tables in the restaurant

Another table walked in and sat in front of me and then someone in green wellington boots walked in and was shown to a table in the corner. They were so bundled up it was hard to tell if it was a woman or a boy but after shedding her jacket, cap and gloves it was a pretty brunette. She sat down, read the menu, placed her order, put in her earphones and took out a book to read, all pretty normal stuff but what came next wasn’t.

In case you have never been to Davinci’s, they have paper table cloths and little buckets with crayons on each table and patrons are encouraged to use these to express their creativity.

The girl in the green boots read a few pages of her book and then seemed to notice the crayons. The next thing she was writing down or drawing something from her book and I must say it was quite fascinating to watch her.

Then the woman at the table in front of me started to doodle and then out of nowhere people just started to flow into the restaurant and the whole atmosphere just seems to change. By the time I left there were people at tables all over the restaurant scribbling away while they waited for their food and it was almost like they had been affected by the restaurants personality which had raised its head.

And that was it, restaurants have unique personalities or rather some of them do…

Why this is, I am not sure, maybe it’s because people like the girl in the green wellington boots at Davinci’s just feel a need to be creative when they are there, maybe it’s because of Arnold and his team at Arnold’s on Kloof who are always at the front of the shop interacting with their customers, maybe its Massimo from Massimo’s manning his flaming Pizza oven like the captain at the helm of his ship and maybe its Mari and Henry’s personality and passion for what they do, coming through in their food and service at La Mouette, maybe its the girl behind the counter who serves you coffee every morning and makes you feel like she is smiling just at you.

It’s probably a combination of all of these and more but it’s suddenly hit me that every great restaurant that I enjoy going back to has a unique personality and its this personality as much as the food or the ambience that makes me want to keep going back.

For me this has filled in a vital piece of the puzzle and the same way that I strive to capture a person’s personality when I shoot them the challenge now is to do the same for the restaurants I shoot.

It’s not often a write a review that’s not photography based and writing one on a restaurant is a first for me but then most restaurants don’t live up to the reputation of being good and its very seldom that one lives up to a reputation of being bad.

I am the first to admit that I am not one of the local foodie crowd and I am by no means a restaurant critic but it may come as a surprise to many of you that I know food because I grew up around it what with my mother always cooking when I was small and then later having a few very good restaurants and coffee shops. In my teens I used to work in the kitchens of her restaurants to help with the bills and to earn pocket money. Yes ladies I can cook extremely well.

My mother was down from Calitzdorp this weekend and we decided to meet at Arnold’s for coffee this morning but they were full so she suggested we try Café Sophia next door. I have often walked past it and it’s nearly always empty and friends have said the food isn’t great but there were a few people inside and my mom wanted to try it.

The first challenge is finding the entrance as it’s mostly a glass box and quite a few people seemed to have the same problem. Once inside I must say it’s a very nice venue and the pretty hostess was very friendly and efficient as was the waitress who served us.

Unfortunately things started going downhill from here. There was an aircon on, blowing warm air and this was creating a damp warmish feel, which had both of us sniffing and coughing a little by the time we left. I ordered a cappuccino which had virtually no taste. To eat I ordered an omelette and my mother ordered a breakfast.

I am pretty sure my omelette was made in a microwave because the egg was like a rubbery matt and even the cheese and mushrooms were rubbery. The only time I have ever seen eggs like that is when I forgot my scrambled eggs in the microwave and created a rubber omelette. You can make good scrambled eggs in a microwave but that’s an entirely different topic and skill.

My mother’s bacon looked like it had been poached rather than grilled and the presentation really wasn’t good.

Now most of you know that I have been shooting a lot of food lately and in most cases I can shoot the food as it comes out of the kitchen and only need to make a few minor teaks. There is no way I could have shot this food, no matter what I did to it

So I was warned, I tried it for myself and unfortunately I won’t be going back