The long weekend’s beautiful warm sunny weather ended spectacularly on Wednesday night. Our house on Sunnyside has a great view to the north so we get to see the lightning and rain clouds passing behind the spire of the Dutch Reformed Church on Hill Street. I’m often asked how I take these images so here goes … This picture’s a live composite of 30 images. My camera’s an Olympus OMD that superimposes each 10 second image on the one before and the nice thing is you get to see the changes on the camera screen as the next picture is being taken. The end result’s lightning flashes snaking out from billowing clouds with sheets of rain gusting down. There’s some more shots taken like this over in my blog at roddyfox.com, you’ll see that I’ve used use the same method to get the stream of car headlights coming up the N2 into Grahamstown.
RODDY FOX
Roddy is a self taught photographer whose first camera, a Zeiss Ikon, was bought in 1974 from a second hand dealer in Glasgow. Through the forty years since then, he's taken landscape photographs with Pentax, Olympus and FujiFilm systems for his teaching and research as a geography academic at Kenyatta and Rhodes Universities. He has always been inspired by great nature and landscape photographers such as Nick Brandt, Beth Moon, Obie Oberholzer and Hans Strand. Since taking early retirement he has been able to pursue his passion for photography, published a photobook ’Symmetry in Nature’ and held three solo exhibitions at the National Arts Festival, Grahamstown, South Africa.
His landscape photography is about light: often at low angles, of forests, mist and clouds, the night sky and lightning. He prints on different media depending on the affects he wants to produce: brushed aluminium for reflecting angled light; Hahnemühle German Etching paper for soft diffusion; Ilford Metallic Gloss for vibrant night pictures.
His conceptual photography uses mirroring and merging of layers to explore patterns, motifs and the feminine in nature.