I’ve been shooting quite a lot of photos with Kanya Spani lately, he’s such a good skater and all round cool guy to hang out with. I shot this photo of him doing an Ollie over this rail to frontside crooked grind. I’m actually not sure what it’s called to be honest! Dressed as a sailor from the Halloween party from the night before and with minimal sleep, he makes it look totally effortless!
These are some photos that I shot of Elliot Sloan at the Maloof Money Cup that was just held recently in Kimblery, South Africa. I think Elliot is the only pro very skater ever to come out of New York, or at least one of the only, I can’t quite remember! Either way, his skating and style on the vert ramp had me stoked! Check him out!
I’ve always struggled with shooting panning shots of moving subjects! I decided that a great place to practice this technique is at Nollie Faith in downtown Johannesburg. The kids are constatnly skating up and down the street, all you need to do is find a good spot and wait for them to come zooming by! These are 2 of my favourite shots taken at Nollie Faith while practising my technique. There will definitely be more to come!
I noticed this kid while shooting photos of the kids skating at Nollie Faith, he just had the cutest expressions on his face as he watched everything goin on around him. I had to shoot a couple photos of him!
I love using the Canon 15mm Fish Eye lens to create different images. It’s fun to use for portraits and distort the image and create a different feeling about an image that might other wise be pretty boring. These are some of my favourite shots from the skate contest at Nollie Faith last Saturday
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This is another shot I took at the Nollie Faith gathering on Saturday. I noticed this little kid sitting on the curb, all by himself while the other kids were skateboarding and having a good time. He looked like he’d been crying. I decided to approach him and try chat to him and maybe sheer him up and get him to enjoy the day with the other kids. I soon realised that his English wasn’t the best but he definitely understood the language of photography and when he saw himself on the screen on the back of my camera, he could barely contain himself! Just by taking his photo, I had completely changed his mood. I’m not sure if he was just excited to see himself on the camera or maybe it made him feel special that someon had taken enough interest in him to actually take a photo of him, either way, it made me feel warm inside. Viva la power of the camera!
These girls from Nollie Faith don’t care to skate much, as you can see they’d rather play with their dolls and chat on the sidewalk.
I headed back into the city this last weekend to shoot some photos of the skate contest that Nollie Faith was putting on for the kids. As always, I was greeted with smiles and giggles and most of the kids couldn’t wait to get in front of my lens! The contest was a great success and I could see the joy in the kids faces and I just couldn’t believe how excited they were to see their friends competing for first and second place. I spent most of the day shooting some portraits but also shot some pics of the contest itself. I’ll have to split the blog posts into seperate parts as there are quite a few photos! This is the first post. Enjoy.
I’ve been spending a lot of time in the downtown area of Johannesburg with all the local skaters. After a long shoot the other day, we all headed to a random street where everyone started playing ‘skate’. It was amazing to just watch these guys throw tricks down like they were nothing! I love Bergen’s style, he does swith stance tricks just as easy as regular ones!
It was full moon the night before last and I decided to see how it would look through my 400mm lens. See for yourselves, the lunar surface as seen from South Africa.
