The Botanic Gardens have some quite magnificent exotic trees. Here’s one of the Giant Yuccas. When I worked at Rhodes I used to walk through Bots nearly every day. I’d enter through the ornamental gate on Grey Street, then down the steps through the fig trees, over the little bridge that the #Fees Must Fallists torched, and then up (past this Yucca) and along the avenue of oaks to exit beneath the huge Dragon Trees at the Lucas Avenue entrance. Unfortunately you can no longer get in from Grey Street and so this lovely through route is a thing of the past.
I took the photo early one morning when there was hot berg wind blowing. It’s shot with the wide angle M.Zuiko 7-14mm PRO lens – one of my favorite lenses.
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.