Thanda Workshop - August 2012

One of the photographic advantages of winter in South Africa is the fact that there is so much dust in the air. Everything is bone dry (unless you live in Durban and even then it's not exactly like the summer time ;walking in a swimming pool' humidity). Most people think that dust has few advantages, but what it does do is add that much more thickness to the perceived atmosphere. What this does is ensure that you can shoot nice orange and red sun balls even when the sun is relatively high above the horizon. It's just that much more difficult to get these during summer. So naturally, it being dry last week while in Thanda, the photography students and myself ended up shooting a lot of sundisks.

A Teacher's Learning - Drakensberg Workshop August 2012

A panoramic stitch of the Milky Way from Witsieshoek Mountain Lodge

One of the greatest perks to being a workshop instructor and photography teacher is that you get to learn so much. Occasionally I feel a touch guilty that I might just be getting more out of the workshop than my own students are getting. This isn’t to say that I’m not working hard to inform and guide the students, but that they give back as much as they are getting and, in my opinion, are often giving more than they realise as it’s information that I’m also hungry for. 

To Clone or Not to Clone...

It's a slippery slope that I often talk to students about. Do you remove unwanted objects from an image or not? To me it ultimately comes down to the actual usage of the image. This is easy to control in most situations, but not in stock photography. Once your images are uploaded to an agencies' collection there is little control over the actual usage of the imagery. In fact there is less than little, there is none!

Getaway Featured

Over the years I have been regularly submitting images to South Africa's Getaway Magazine for inclusion in their Getaway Gallery. Recently a few of these images have also been selected for the Getaway Ultimate Destinations feature - a double page spread showing off places of interest but also with a specific emphasis on the photography itself. In particular the image below was used in the July edition while another image was included in the August edition.

However, the other reason for this post is that Getaway subsequently asked to put me in the featured photographers section of the website. This can be seen by clicking the link or going directly to this address: http://photo.getaway.co.za/albums/featured-photographers/emil-von-maltitz/.