Down to the Featherstone Brewery

Grahamstown’s own craft beers come from the Featherstone Brewery which is located on Brackenhill Farm just a few kilometres out of town where the N2 winds its way down through Howieson’s Poort. On their web site are directions on how to walk to the beer garden. You can go from Mountain View Manor (on Mountain Drive) and the route goes pretty much right through this picture starting down the left hand skyline and then across to where the headlights on the N2 disappear behind a ridge.

If you follow me on Instagram (@roddythefox) you’ll know that I post quite a few night photos. This is a 30 second exposure clearly showing the Milky Way and the two Magellanic Clouds. On the right hand skyline you can even make out the lights of the police station at Kinkelbos.

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.