"Ringlight Richie"

I read about a flash system called a ring-light, which appealed to me a lot, because it seemed to be capable of producing portraits that ordinarily you’d need studio lights for. You can imagine that in a zero space zone like HK, you can lose popularity for the kind of arrangement you see here on the left.  So, a ringlight – not a name that anything would have wanted, I’d think – which is intended for macro photos mainly, but can also be used for a certain style of portrait, and gives a very even sort of light when shooting close up (hence the macro thing). I had a look at a couple online, at a shop, phoned around to see if there were any cheap to buy Chinese made ones (I mean of course unbranded Chinese made ones – given that the bulk of stuff is made in China anyway) – but alas, nothing to be had. When I looked at a Nikon branded one, it consisted of two diffuser covered lights mounted on either side of the lens, facing inwards at 45 degrees – so if you shot something, you’d get diffuse light from close-up on either side (the Canon one is more like a ring of light around the end of the lens. All of them were very pricy, and I remembered that my friend Jens told me that he’d built one out of a big plastic bowl which he’d cut a hole in and lined with shiny stuff.  I remember this because he'd taken a particularly cool photo of Camilla with it.  I thought about the bowl option, and decided instead to go with the Nikon sort of idea – and give it a try by building one out of cardboard, lined on the inside with shiny tape; the idea being that it would fit over the end of my existing flash in a Y-shape.  The light would be reflected in two directions, and then out the sides of the end of y. This on the right is what the finished product looks like – and while I’m sure it’s effect is quite un-ring-lightish – it produces a very cool pool of close range, diffuse (i.e. shadows with soft rather than very hard, sharp edges) concentrated light with good separation between what you are aiming at close up and the background – in a way the sort of effect that you get only with a studio setup – but this one takes a sec to strap onto the end of the flash. For example, the second one below of Evan, shot in daytime, in our house, and really the background is just some interesting shape and mild colour - the only thing really going on is un-smiling Evan.  I’m pretty chuffed with it. It’s one of the things that is quite cool about photography – when it comes to light and managing it, improvisation and invention do fine (capturing it is of course much more expensive, and harder to do with a home-job). I’ve spent the rest of the weekend (other than tennis and the regular Sunday trip to the beach) blasting away with it. Everyone is pretty sick of the whole thing however (except Aiden who has real patience with me and my camera, and is always up for a bit of clowning around. Evan is simply on strike. He’s decided that if I’m going to stick a camera in his face, he’ll respond by looking really harassed and cross – which is funny – but it does make for an endless parade of grumpy portraits. So I have to make deals now – things like saying OK, I want to take a picture of you shouting very loudly (ooh, OK, I like a bit of shouting), or hey Ev, cool tattoo, can I take a picture of your tattoo? (Still looking grumpy though). Even the ultra tolerant Coxes have run out of patience – Courtney giving me the fists (cool pic though, produced in B&W below) - with the exception of Jordan, who like Aiden, is endlessly tolerant. So, below is the latest batch – I think they are pretty cool – hope you like them. PS – I’m bringing it to SA when I next come for work (in May) and I’ll be begging you.

Above, catching Ev on the lav (where he's not doing anything else really might lead to something not entirely grumpy.  To the left - he can really go for it with a bit of shouting - real jet engine blast.

Aiden as a trial "big head"

This probably needs to be explained - more a bit later - just the photo for now (you need to have been scarfing down pasta to get a nice yellow mouth).

A walk

This is trying something - adding grain and vignette to high contrast black and white with added grain - I thought it added something to the insanely misty dark weather - everything hard and inanimate is wet - the floor, the walls the inside of the station even.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The wet end of Winter

I pretty much love this weather - cool and damp and fantanstically green - but it is regarded as a late tail of winter - after all, it's only twenty something degrees.  It was so beautiful inside the woods going up behind our village.  Ev stayed at home (thankfully, because I took a tumble and would typically have been carrying him on my shoulders by then).  Aiden is tireless, and has no problem keeping up which is great.

Ev scowling away as he watches the action in 101 Dalmations from our Cruella-proof bed - the cool hair light comes from a thing called a snoot, off to the left.  I think its a bit overcooked - still learning.

I used the same snoot as a direct light on Aiden's face for this shot - which I think is quite nice, if not a bit gloomy (and then there is the hand-me-down pair of David Beckham pajamas which is a bit yesterday).  I later watched a training vid on snoots on youtube, and they're actually not for direct lighting - mmm, pays to check that out first perhaps. 

Welcome to Siri

My friend Lucy and her partner Raman had a baby.  I am really happy for them - the joy of new life, everyone's new life.  Her name is Siri - which I think is beautiful.  She is the first Siri I know. 

Delhi wedding

A Hindu Indian wedding is a fantastic thing, and if you are used to the sort of weddings South Africans have, impossible to imagine. For a start, it runs over five days with a number of different ceremonies, hosted by different people at different places for specific reasons (I will try and describe these, but my memory is a bit blurry, so this will be the gist rather than Wikipedia accuracy). What these have in common in our experience was that each one was a fantastic, beautiful party. I’m not sure what I expected from India, perhaps a lot of people being very spiritual and meditating or something, but this was not that. Fantastic warm people, not sure what I expected, fantastic galaxy-of-flavours super-spicy food, as expected, but not imagined. What I neither expected nor imagined was the way that Delhi can party – and by this I mean a couple of hundred people dancing from start to finish. I did not take my camera to all the events , the first of which is when the groom’s family hosts the bride’s family – such a pity not to have taken it – it was on a farm (which I would probably describe as an estate) in Delhi – it was visually out of this world. The party started at 9am, we had dinner at 2am, and the dance floor was cooking from start (Aiden and Evan and other little kids to begin with) to 4am finish. I got to bed at around five. The second event involved the bride’s extended family visiting the groom’s home to bring them gifts. Within this there was some really lovely symbolism, for example the bride’s brother and the groom sit together and the brother feeds the groom and vice versa to demonstrate their acceptance of one another. It was so beautifully gentle and without machismo, which is a loathsome world problem I think. 

The photo above is of our lovely friend Vandanna, her little boy Veer, and her two nieces (daughters of Vandanna's brother P.C. who we stayed with in Delhi) Pria and Poluk at the third event at the bride's extended family's home, the henna ceremony.  This is when the groom's family takes gifts to the bride's family, and the women have their hands died with beautiful henna patterns in the course of the evening.

The party gets going, cool lights and smoke machines, on the outer edge of the dance-floor.  You can see some of the henna patterns on some of the women's hands at this stage.  The music is very groovy, India style hip hop Bhangra mixes, very cool to dance to.

Ange with Aiden and Ev at the beginning of the last night, before the main ceremony.  Aiden and Evan were completely wasted because we had just woken them up - India weddings require improvised sleeping for little ones.  The start of the evening was incredible, marching bands, horses, groups of drummers, and colour colour colour.

As I said in an earlier post, India really knows how to party - this is the parking lot outside the main reception venue, and as you can see people were really going for it already - woooohoooo.

With the party raging in the parking lot already (spontaneous fireworks, drummers, marching band, mobile bars appearing along the way, and a lot of people really getting down to some serious grooving, you arrive at the venue entrance, it's wonderfully loud and colourful - this guy from the band was absolutely cooking with his shakers - colour and sound in wonderful waves.

The groom, Vandanna's lovely brother Sonny, had been through a marathon of parties and events and being in the limelight, always super-gracious and polite and warm (I think this takes real human endurance, because we are talking about a huge number of people that he has engaged and talked to and laughed with - over five days - add to that minimal sleep - perhaps this is a secret agenda of the five day wedding - if the person you are marrying remains warm emotionally and cool in temprament then the future is bright.  Here he is on the left and below, big smile no doubt, in beautiful clothes in the thick of the dancing and party and drummers and people, on his way into the final function. 

And then you are inside - star-spangled,  fantastic and beautiful, on a lovely warm-cool night.  We had the absolutely best time Josh - India - I really hope to go again (and again) and I would so recommend going if you ever can - it's like Africa without the edge, and China with souped-up heart and soul.

Neemrana Palace

On the way back to Delhi we met Virendra, Vandanna and Veer at Neemrana Palace for a night. It was built in 1300 and something, and at some point was converted into a boutique hotel. I’m running out of hyperbole, but I think these late afternoon pics above and below will speak for me (though again, a lack of wide angle lens means the scale is just not captured). An incredible building of extraordinary size, atop a hill overlooking India. The boys and I had a blast – Ange did too – but unfortunately of the Delhi Belly version; she was just completely hammered by some grim biotic; Aiden Ev and I were fortunate to escape pretty much unscathed.

Indian innovativeness; no TV or internet connection - so best we have a quick game on the old man's phone (sigh) before crashing for the night

The next morning I got up early to look out of my window at this mist enshrouded plain below the palace with the sounds of India waking up and stretching below.  I went for a walk with the camera to the lower terraces of the palace to shoot this one.

I like the below picture a lot, and I think it’s illustrative – life in India is tough for most of its people, in the sense that work is hard, and convenience limited. But it is also collective and therein seems joyful; people are with and surrounded by others, and beauty matters. I took this picture of five women across a valley to the side of the palace with my long lens. There was nothing on the side of the rugged hill to suggest where they were going, and it must have been a very tough trek, especially as they were carrying things. But they were together, and infinitely colourful in their rugged surrounds. 

Samode, and the road to Neemrana

We left Jaipur and travelled through the countryside to the cool shady ancient walled town of Samode, which surprise surprise, has a fantastic palace. It’s a proper walled city, so old (I’m not sure how, sorry) that the outer walls had very long thin vertical slots in them – so that archers could adjust the range of their arrows directed at some now long distant, unfortunate foe.

The streets are fantastic cobbled stone, and the paradox of time is everywhere; click on this pic – ancient cobbled road, ancient buildings, a camel drawn cart, but a painted wall with a cell phone number on it advertising something.

The palace was (I don’t have an appropriate English word) detailed and beautiful. Instead of the outside I thought I’d show you a tiny bit of the the in. Here is a room, looking down from a balcony sort of passageway – perhaps a bit busy for some tastes – but profoundly beautifully done – and I don’t know how long ago – but more than a few yesterdays.  All the white stuff is polished marble.

In the little towns dotting rural Rajastan, way off the beaten track now – going is a little slower – and any form of transport will do. I really liked the guys in the tractor trailer – wrapped up as they were in their turbans.  The tractor is an old Massey Ferguson - something that reminded me of my childhood Eastern  Cape holidays.

And everywhere, along all the roads, walked the flag people. Every so often there would be a tractor with a trailer – on the back of it (no doubt a lot of car batteries and) some really huge speakers pumping out Banghra at a zillion watts. Nothing on earth parties like India – more of that later though.

More fantastic landscape - drilling down to detail, then interior

Wow! Jaipur!

(Confidentially I will tell you that the good people running Blogger have just updated the editor.  It does work much better it seems, and the standard post pictures are much bigger (at last, thank you blogger) but the process of working out how to sequence these photos - man 20 years ago I would have been taking this laptop for a swim in the hotel pool - come to think of it 20 years ago laptops did not exist.  Enjoy Jaipur)

Jaipur is not called the Pink City for nothing – it is genuinely pink – and amazing in every respect. We entered the city through a mountain pass, which you descend to a beautiful lake, in the middle of which is a palace – the Lake Palace – it’s a good forewarning of what is to come – scale, detail and colour beyond anything which I have seen before.

The palaces and castles and history are incredible; all of it in this arid mountainous topography, under azure sky – huge, desolate, fantastic – a monster Karoo, with mountains, and castle upon castle.

We took an elephant up to one of the castles. If you click on the photo above you will get an idea of scale - the wall just goes on and on, over the mountains, over the horizon.  Elephants are quite an interesting form of transport. They go up steps for example (and on the streets of Jaipur - chaotic - they have serious right of way).  I would not describe its rocking and rolling as particularly smooth – but they do have aircon – in the form of the thing waving its trunk up and blasting you with a cool jet of air and (what I can only conclude were) droplets of elephant snot – I did not see our friendly tusker sucking up any water along the way. Aiden and Evan did not fool around while the Elephant rocked up the steep roads to the castle.  I do not have a wide enough angle lens to get in the ellie and us, so you'll have to settle for eyes-closed Aiden, a piece of the structure you sit on, and a bit of traffic in the road ahead.

The castle was utterly enormous – with profound detail, an impossible to imagine scale of art – have a look at the detail on one of the entrances.

Inside was an intergalactic maze of corridors and passages and secret balconies and private little courtyards – utterly disorienting and vast vast vast. The walls of many of the passageways were some sort of detailed polished cretestone (I could not imagine the number of skilled artisans and years this place must have taken to build) creating these fantastic scaled shapes in some places and paths of light transfer and reflection in others.

On the top of the castle was this fantastic courtyard – people and Elephants milling around; how cool is this pop-art finish photo of Ange and Ev?

And of course when we gave him a call when we were ready to go – Raj materialized as if by magic in the courtyard – cool, and calm, smiling for a photo with Aiden and Zebedee (the class Zebra which kids get to take for a week at a time and take pics of for their travel book. I don’t think Zebedee has been to Rajastan before.  I was petrified of losing the damn thing – to the extent that I was thinking before we left where I might get an identical one from to take on the trip).  Raj epitomised service professionalism - an absolute lesson to anyone providing services to anyone else.

Aiden watches a thunderstorm brewing over Jaipur from a hotel window.  Down below, kids played cricket on the rooftops.  India had the day before beaten South Africa by one run in the same city.