My 2013/14 holiday took me along part of the Garden Route. It might just be the splendor of the places there, but I kept on having spectacular views that I started to capture in panoramas using my Samsung S3 phone.
So, here is my holiday in panoramas:
Not all the views, not all the places and not all good photographs…but some views, some places and certainly one or two panoramas I am quite proud of.
The latest result is a short photo montage of Johannesburg CBD that I took earlier this years with an accompanying acoustic piece by me. I call it “Empty Roads, Crowded Streets”.
If anyone wants just the music and not the video, then you can download the mp3 here: Empty Roads Session.
Few of you probably know that I’ve played guitar most of my life. It has been quite a while since I recorded anything, but more the reason to do so!
Anyone looking through this site will also notice that I like taking pseudo-arty photos. In the background I have been building a rather challenging album called “abstract superheroes”.
So, it was fairly logical to put both these art forms together and (thanks to Google’s Picasa 3!) produce a third and shiny new (to me, at least) art form: “Abstract Superheroes”.
The pictures speak for themselves and the guitar is really a layered recording of myself. A simple chord progression with a layered acoustic lead over it. Both were played on my Ibanez acoustic (nylon string) and I think it came out alright… The creepy voice was a built from a text-to-voice synth with some reverb and editing.
I saw the Kings of Leon this year when they came to Joburg. Besides the music (which was great, by the way; check out my favourite Kings of Leon song here), I’ve always been fascinated by huge collections of people all together for a common purpose.
Crowd dynamics are really something else… Even beyond the obvious social dynamics, crowds at concerts have a level of collective energy that is hard to define. But impossible to deny.
I call the above picture “Girl in the Crowd” and it was taken at the Kings of Leon concert I mentioned earlier.
I’ve tried to capture not just the size, not just the atmosphere, but the individual actions of each of the individuals in the foreground. The guy on the left is talking, the guy on the right is walking and the girl in the crowd is sitting, silently and waiting in anticipation for the start of the concert.
Thanks to chats with a number of people, including Simon Brown, I have decided to start messing around with photography. I’ve played in a range of artistic mediums before, but this is a new one to me and I appreciate that I’ve got a lot to learn.
That said, it’s not problem. Rather an exciting journey of discovery!
Below is a series of three picture taken from a photography session in a park in Jozi and I call it “Beneath Nature”: