But when photographing an area it is certainly worth turning your back on the “obvious” photo.

I got some lovely pictures of the Glenelg Jetty, about 20 minutes from the Adelaide centre, with a wonderful cloud formation in the sky. I made this a black and white photographs. I also wanted a shot looking back at the land. As people rushed past me to the end of the jetty with cameras in hand, they flashed the odd glance of “this guy is crazy” as I ignored the beautiful sunset behind me and rather took pictures of Glenelg itself. Funny thing is, I was the only one taking pictures in that direction.

The resulting photograph has some beautiful blue sky and excellent light. Remeber to always use a tripod in low light conditions

sunset over the glenelg jetty in Adelaide, South Australia

Glenelg Jetty just after sunset, Adelaide, South Australia

Cheers,

Morne de Klerk - Photography Life

It still needed a little bit of a touch up in Photoshop, so I thought I would share some of the steps here.

so this is the original image without any retouching

I selected the sky and adjusted the levels, contrast and a slight bit of extra saturation. Although if you shoot at this time with your back to the sunset, you would get a dark rich natural blue colour.

So this is the original picture with the sky adjusted

Next I selected the house and adjusted the same again. Contrast, levels and saturation. Also, there was a lot of reflection in the left window from my flash. I removed a bit of the reflections with a combination of the clone stamp tool and the healing brush tool.

The finished image

Hope you found it useful.

Cheers

Morne de Klerk - Photography Life

The two pictures were taken within about 20 km’s from each other. One in the Clare Valley and the other just outside on the way from the Riverland.

Cheers

Morne de Klerk - Photography Life

two gum trees in the Clare Valley in South Australia in misty winter conditions

A farm house stand deserted near the Clare Valley in South Australia

We are off to a good start; our wedding is organised in five minutes on the phone. The Fijian village woman who takes our call is nonchalant. “You want to get married? No problem.”

The village church and choir are ours for $F250 ($173). All done, our village homestay host family has become our wedding planner.

From Nadi airport we travel two hours by bus along the Coral Coast and arrive at our rendezvous point blissfully ignorant of further wedding details. We are met warmly by our homestay host Simon, taxi driver and grandfather of four, in whose house we will be staying, in the small, traditional Fijian coastal village of Namatakula. His greeting is full of enthusiasm. “Bula! Everything is ready for the wedding tomorrow.”

Tomorrow is a public holiday in Fiji, for the Hindu festival of Diwali. However, the lovely (and determined) people of our village have arranged for the registry office in the nearest town, Sigatoka, to open in the morning just for us to do thepaperwork.

The registry office is in a wonderfully decrepit-looking two-storey building, with floorboards that squeak and complain as we climb its stairs. The cheery young clerk who has come in especially for us is surprised to hear we are getting married in the village. He thinks it’s a wonderful idea and warns us to check the spelling of our names carefully as we sign. Unfortunately, the key to the photocopier room seems to be on holiday, too. No problem: the clerk decides we can photocopy our IDs in a shop tomorrow and leave them with Simon to submit when he’s next in town.

Back at the village, we find a group of locals decorating the church. With much care, they plait palm leaves around the veranda posts, tie ribbons to the wooden pews and scatter frangipanis over the cement floor of the large, austere building. We have paid for only the minister and the choir, so we are impressed by the effort, though also a little daunted.

A few hours before the wedding, my husband-to-be is given a sarong-style sulu to wear over his shorts and we are presented with leis of intricately threaded tropical flowers in red, yellow and white. I wear a strapless pale-blue dress with a small cardigan to cover my shoulders. Delicate violet orchids form my bouquet and we are proudly handed specially printed programs.

Sweat trickles down the insides of my knees as we sit and wait in Simon’s living room. We photograph each other, before handing our equipment over to Ben, a villager who has volunteered to record everything for us. Elastic Fiji time rules: it’s more than 1 1/2 hours before we are called to the church.

Finally the village drums beat for the third time and we are led off by Ben, who operates our camera with one hand and our video camera with the other. Our witnesses, Irena and Vili, follow behind; we are told they’ve been chosen for the honour as they have the best outfits in the village.

Hot, barefoot and apprehensive, we walk hand-in-sweaty-hand up the aisle. Village children curiously squashing their faces through the open church windows are a useful distraction from the seriousness of the event.

At the altar, the reverend speaks solemnly and we say our part. The choir sings and it’s all over. Simon later tells us we are the first non-Fijians to get married at Namatakula.

Keturah de Klerk - Photography Life

Toward the Light

Keturah and I drove to Callington for a Thursday training session at the football club. Footy, like rugby is a winter sport. Unfortunately, that means very early sunsets.

In summer time, in Adelaide, the sun goes down as late as 21:30, but on this freezing Adelaide Hills night, it was well dark at the start of training at about 18:30.

We always knew that this would be the case, we just hoped that the flood lights lighting the field would be powerful enough for us to shoot pictures.

Stretches

Shooting with a 1D Mark IV (for fast focus tracking) and a 5D Mark II (for 21 Megapixel quality and full frame sensor), both cameras we were able to shoot at about 8000 iso filmspeed. The quality looks ok. I guess we will find out when we try and print them really big.

The final result were some interesting pictures where the lights are mostly the feature of the picture. Also, the use of long shutter speeds to create movement is an advantage to create some different shots.

Cheers

Morne de Klerk - Photography Life

Drills under lights

Passing practice

SPOT the players

Warm Up before the game

As I hit the freeway, Chris Cornell blares: Burning that Gasoline!! YEAHHHH!!

I’m a bit nervous as to what I will encounter at Callington Football club in the Adelaide Hills. After the amazing success we had in South Africa while doing our photographic project on soccer, we thought it might be nice to continue with a sport theme from time to time.

We came up with a few ideas and suddenly we realised that we have been taking for granted what is in our own back yard. It struck us that Aussie Rules is played everywhere in South Australia! On a Saturday you set foot outside your front door and you trip over an someone kicking a footy!

Now it might be the greatest game ever invented (according to some), but apart from about half the Australian population (the other half follows Rugby league passionately) and a few small pockets of  expats in other countries, EVERYONE I have met finds it EXTREMELY strange.

The ball gets thrown in from the sideline

I have covered a lot of AFL and SANFL for the newspaper in Adelaide and also Getty Images and I have to say that Aussie Rules is probably my favourite sport to photograph, ever. It is packed full of bone crunching action, high flying marks and players showing spectacular agility. On top of all that, it is so random, the game can at any moment move in any of the 360 degrees!

So it seems only natural to try and take a more in depth look at Aussie rules through photographs.

This day was to be first contact with the Hills Country League. I wanted country footy, not necessarily people that get payed to play. And when I thought of country footy, I though of Callington. The most well known club in the league, unfortunately for all the wrong reasons. They have been losing  all their matches by quite a margin in recent history. But I find it inspiring that their players are dedicated to the club. Even with a losing streak they are managing to put a team on the park each week. Training and playing!

So these pictures are to celebrate the commitment to the game. For the record Callington kicked 2 goals that day.

Cheers

A mark taken on the second attempt

Captain chasing hard

Coach gives advice at Half Time

Action during the game

The end is near

Morne de Klerk - Photography Life

Amazing, as we sit waiting for the first game of the football World Cup, we are recovering from seeing this great story by Stateline on the photographic project which has consumed the last 9 months of our lives.  The fact that Stateline aired with our story on the same night, just hours before the first game of the World Cup, is the icing on the cake.

After completing a photographic project on soccer or football in South Africa from a grass roots level, having a book published in South Africa and opening the exhibition in South Australia last night, we are finally watching the first game of the World Cup, and what our project was leading up to.  It’s great that it’s finally come together and now we wait for South Africa to (hopefully) win the first game.

Check out the piece by Stateline (not Photographic Life but mentioning it here so that you can find us as Photography Life)

And the write up in The Advertiser for the Africa’s Game exhibition

cheers

Keturah de Klerk

Photography Life

Our last soccer training visit of South Africa last week and we were lucky enough to visit 2 very different soccer teams to photograph their training.

The first, the older team, the Paballelo Chiefs.  The club began in 1972 by a group of young unemployed men seeking to occupy their time by doing what they do best, play soccer.  Since then the team has had great success and for the first time we photographed a team training at an actual soccer stadium with standard training equipment.

Soccer stadium training, jumping over tiny hurdles

In this last week of our trip we were beginning to get a little tired of photographing soccer training, however the training never failed to inspire photography from us as each session was different and energizing.

With equipment set up in an obstacle course of soccer sorts the players were given a hectic workout, and i got very excited down on one shoulder in the grass to get this jumping shot just right, and hopefully not get my head squashed in the process!

A couple of team photos followed and we said our farewells, moving right next door to a large dirt field where another team were about to commence their training.

This was again back to Gino’s historical field to give him the photos from the previous week and hear how they went at the first match of the season on the weekend, they’d won!

Gino Williams, coach and co-owner of Super Eagles

This time we wanted to video some of his team’s training as we’d been impressed the week before by the sight and sound of their drills which involved singing  as they practiced their footwork!

Using the video function of our Canon 5d we managed to get some footage of the training, as well as an interview with the 2 owners and a player, very cool high definition video!

Cheers

Keturah de Klerk - Photography Life

The photo I’d been planning for a week was a fail, the one I’d thought I’d add on if I had time, was the winner, of sorts.

soccer training

We had arranged with a soccer team to meet them back at their beautiful red soccer field today to photograph their soccer training. They would wear their soccer jerseys just for us and let us interrupt their training for any photos we needed.

After trying some ‘movement’ photos while the players did their drills, for some reason, I’m not sure why, I decided to do the extra photo next, not the one I’d been planning.

I grabbed the goalie who was quite happy to plunge his body again and again into the dirt for us, until I got a photo I was happy with. With the tracking focus on to catch him as he dived towards the camera and the polarising filter to keep the sky blue, I sadly sacrificed F-stops for shutter speed at ISO650 and shot at 1/800 and F3.5. Happy with the exposure and freeze of my subject and aware that depth of field was way too small, why oh why didn’t I think to move the tracking focus point to top right? Top right or right, where his head was landing again and again?

goalie in action

Only after having fun with the goalie did I decide to get to the planned photo, by which time it was far too late. The sun was almost down and the shadows (which were to be the key part of the photo) were far too long. Fail.

Nevermind, the goalie shots are nice, even if some have his shorts sharp instead of his face!

committed goalie, even in practice

cheers

Keturah de Klerk - Photography Life

Soccer coach Gino Williams was just a boy of about 10 when he ran through chaos from this soccer field as police fired on the community gathered there in Paballelo, a township of Upington in 1985.

The historical soccer field in Paballelo

The Paballelo community used the soccer field for town meetings at the time, as they were forbidden to use any building, since gatherings of 5 black people or more were banned by the Apartheid government of the time, for fear that they were conspiring against the government.

During this meeting, Gino tells us, Police arrived and warned them that they had 5 minutes to disperse. According to Gino they were not given these 5 minutes before police began firing tear gas into them. Many residents were injured. A very scared little boy, Gino ran with the others, then remembered his mother was barefoot and ran back to look for her.

Some time later a fight broke out just behind the soccer field, between residents and a local policeman. There was much anger over the shooting and as the anger and frustration grew, the policeman ended up being killed by necklacing; the term used for when a tyre is placed over someone’s head so it sits around the neck and is set alight.

26 men were charged for the murder. The Upington 26 was the name given to the case and the men held in prison during the long trial:

“The Upington 26 story details the events of the killing of a policeman in Paballelo and the dramatic trial that followed. In 1985, at a soccer field near the entrance of Paballelo, the Paballelo community gathered to discuss rental problems they were experiencing. The events that followed entail tear gas being thrown by the police, the crowd panicking, an 11 year old boy being shot and paralysed by the police and a policeman being killed. Fifty-four people were held after the riot, 26 were charged and 14 people were sentenced to death, including a 60-year-old woman and her husband, for the so-called ‘common purpose’ killing of the policeman. They were all eventually released.” (http://www.openafrica.org/route/kalahari-oasis-route)

Soccer training, carry them accross the field

Now in his early 30’s, Gino works for the Upington council and started this soccer club as his own initiative five years ago. He believes the youths need to be kept busy in this positive way. He tells us that many of his players live in depressing situations, in very poor circumstances, but that you wouldn’t know it to see them on the field. He believes being part of a soccer team keeps them out of crime and away from local gangs and he points out several boys as specific examples, saying that he has seen real change in them.

He points out some difficulties although there is no need. We can see the state of their training field, it is littered with glass and other rubbish and one of the goal posts has been sold for its metal. The local stadium is far too expensive for them to hire, he explains. Perhaps the most worrying, and yet what would seem the most basic, is transport between venues for games.

Games are often in different towns around Upington and taxis and buses are far too expensive. So the teams have to travel on the back of bakkies (utes) at the mercy of the driver. In this way accidents have happened, Gino shows us his hand that it seems has had massive skin grafting and he calls over a player to show us the huge scar across his head. It seems they were lucky, 3 of his players are no longer able to play.

Soccer training, musical footwork

We photograph their soccer training, which, in keeping with South African initiative that we have encountered, is entertaining and inventive. Footwork drills are carried out energetically and musically – I marvel when I hear their counting in unison change to song.

This weekend the games are at their local stadium, walking distance.

Keturah de Klerk - Photography Life