The joy of carrying a camera everywhere is that I get the chance to play with it whenever I get bored. Granted a lot of the photos I shoot under such circumstances aren't really worth the bother, but sometimes I find pleasing results in the most unexpected place.
I imagine the guy washing the windscreen of my car thought I was a bit crazy when he saw me taking this shot, but I was happy with the result.
I don't often take photos of flowers growing in nature. Usually my flower photos show flowers growing on potted plants. More often than not they're growing on my bonsai trees. However there are occasions when I need something a bit different and in May 2011 I needed to find a more natural view in a hurry.
I didn't have to look far as the daisy bush in my garden was covered with flowers. It's not a beautiful plant though and I wasn't sure that I'd be able to get anything interesting, but I had to try.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered this little guy hiding in one of the flowers.
He moved around quite a bit during this shoot, but was cooperative enough to let me get several shots I liked.
This moth wasn't nearly as spectacular as the one I shared yesterday, and the photo would almost certainly have lacked interest but for some lucky lighting. I wish I knew what made him position himself so perfectly facing into his shadow.
It's been quite a while since I took this photo and I can't remember what I was actually shooting that evening, but I was using my extension tubes and had the camera on a tripod, so everything was set up perfectly when I spotted this moth on the wall. He was really tiny - much, much smaller than he appears in this picture.
I wish I'd seen him with his wings spread out, but no doubt if I'd tried to get him to move he'd have flown away.
I'm not often lucky enough to find moths or butterflies that are prepared to keep still for long enough for me to get decent photos, and it seemed that things would be no different when I first came across this moth, perched high up on a wall of my greenhouse. There was just no way that I could get close enough to get the shot I wanted and reluctantly I was forced to give up on what I was sure would be a one-off opportunity.
Second chances rarely happen, but this time I was lucky. Two days later I found him on the garage wall at just the right height for me to get the shot I wanted without having to do any uncomfortable contortions.
It was only later, when looking at the photo, that I noticed how much his wings resemble a curled-up leaf.
It's nearly two years since I took this photo and I've never seen another moth quite like him. Perhaps I never will.
In January I needed a photo of clouds for an online challenge. As the rules dictated that the photo had to be taken during that week, I kept my eyes open for something interesting in my immediate surroundings and discovered some interesting cloud activity around a palm tree growing in my next-door neighbours' garden. This was the resulting image.
In the weeks that followed I decided to see if I could get an interesting time lapse video of the cloud activity around that tree, so I set up my video camera on a tripod, in hope that the weather would cooperate.
After a few false starts during which my camera setting were way off what was required, I finally got the technical side sorted out. One sunny afternoon I set the camera up and left it to film unattended while I got on with other things. After I while I was starting to despair of getting anything worthwhile as there wasn't a cloud in the sky.
Then, as it typical of Johannesburg weather, things changed very quickly, and the result was a video in which there were heavy rain and a few bolts of lightning. If my memory serves me correctly we had hail too, though it's not apparent from this footage.
Some days I have fun taking photos of things that are really ordinary, like the lock in this shot. I liked the way it seemed to be smiling at me.
Taking the photos is only a small part of the job though. I often spend a lot of time messing around in Photoshop, producing several different edits of the same photo.
I had a really tough time deciding which edit I wanted to share in this post.
Some people claim that Johannesburg is the world's largest man made forest. In fact there's even a Facebook community celebrating that idea.
Others dispute that a city can be called a forest, but regardless Johannesburg certainly has a lot of trees.
These photos was taken on a sunny summer afternoon in 2014, while I was caught in a traffic jam.
There are masses of these pine trees growing on an island in the middle of the road, separating the traffic going in opposite directions. If you look closely you can just catch a glimpse of some of the cars headed the other way.
Several pedestrians walked past us while the traffic refused to budge.
Sometimes being in a car isn't the quickest way to reach your destination!
