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Tangents

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May 3, 2009

Digging deep into the archives, here are some of my favorite images from way back.  They were all shot on transparency film - Fuji Provia RDP being my choice of film at the time.  And as usual with personal photography, there are memories and stories attached to these images ..

[ Pentax Super-A; Pentax-A 35-105mm f3.5 // Johannesburg, South Africa // circa '88 ]

This is a candid image.  As the boy in front of me was watching a polar bear swim in his tank at the Jo’burg zoo, he lifted his hand up to match it against the polar bear’s paw.  There’s something magical about this image for me.  Pity about the crack in the glass – the image would’ve been even more enigmatic without that real-world flaw.

As was usual when I walked around, exploring with my camera, I had a habit of pre-focusing on various distances as I anticipated I might come across things to photograph.  And this meant that I only had to lift my eye to the camera, and the (manual focus) camera was already focused very-very-nearly correctly.

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 [ Pentax Z-1; Pentax-FA 28-105mm f4-5.6 // Johannesburg, South Africa // June '94 ]

To get this photograph of the DC3 flying over Johannesburg, I had to wind down the window of aircraft (an old Junkers) that I was in!  Incredible to think that you could just wind down a window of an aircraft in mid-flight!  And yes, we can actually see the air we breathe there. ; )

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[ Pentax Z-1; Pentax-A 24-50mm f4 // Johannesburg, South Africa // Nov '93

This wonderful and over-size mural  in Yeoville, Johannesburg, has long since been demolished when the building was updated and painted a staid colour of bland.  The entire character of the neighborhood has radically changed since then, with everything left to decay.  I'm not even sure if the No Parking sign would still be there anymore.  And as with some of the other images shown here, I used a polarizing filter to cut glare and saturate the colors.

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[ Pentax Super-A; Pentax-A 24-50mm f4 // South Africa // circa '89 ]

This landscape in Zululand is a loose series I was working on where I tried to reduce landscapes to basic geometric shapes.  A polarizer filter gave the deep saturated colors, especially in the sky.

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[ Pentax Super-A; Pentax-A 24-50mm f4 // South Africa // circa '89 ]

A polarizing filter punched the sky that deep a shade of blue.  I love the stark contrast that the polarizer gives to the white clouds and over-saturated sky.

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 [ Pentax Super-A; Pentax-A 24-50mm f4 // South Africa // circa '89 ]

Brakko, my lovable Dalmatian that I had.  I still insist that Disney didn’t quite do them justice in how adorable and companionable they are.  He looked quite apprehensive here at being photographed so closely.  I remember that at the time I was testing out my brand-new used flashmeter – an old Gossen.  Early days.

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[ Pentax Z-1; Pentax-FA 28-105mm f4-5.6 // Johannesburg, South Africa // circa '92 ]

I would often wander around with my camera, exploring, and looking for interesting and things to photograph.  This afternoon I was watching cars and delivery bikes swish past, and I was practicing panning with them … and then this colorful character zoomed by on his Harley.  I remember it was one of those moments where I just knew I had the shot .. and I also realized that nothing else I would get that day would match this .. so I just went home right after I took photograph..

 

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