The recent hot and humid weather has brought some amazing light and thunder clouds – as it often does- and unfortunately the best time to get out with the camera usually seems to be when the day’s at its hottest. I’m lucky that the very photogenic Cross Street is just down the road from where we live and so I can get there quickly.
Here’s a long exposure of the storm clouds last week, it’s taken looking down the street to the clouds passing over Makana’s Kop. There was lightning in the picture too but it was so bright that it ‘blew out’ part of the clouds in the picture. That’s inspite of having both a neutral density and circular polarising filter on the camera.
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.