Photography with Soul
Life is interesting. I don’t understand cricket. They don’t teach cricket at schools in Germany, at least when I grew up there. When I got a call from Psitek, one of my regular corporate clients and Marilize told me that they are organizing an event with Makhaya Ntini, the cricket player, I didn’t know who he was. Luckily, Google exists and helped me out.
For those of you, who grew up with the disadvantage of not knowing much about cricket (which I describe as a sophisticated form of baseball). Mahaya Ntini is the first black cricketer playing for the South African national team. I understand that he is also “only the third South African to take 300 Test wickets after Shaun Pollock and Alan Donald, and to reach second place in the ICC test match bowling ratings” (according to Wikipedia).
Luckily, the Cape Town Xing group is organizing an event targeted at uninitiated people like me to teach us the basic rules of this game, which can go on for days.
The shoot started in the morning and lasted to the later afternoon and included a good amount of driving in the winelands of Stellenbosch and the northern suburbs of Cape Town. Some of the images will be used for a brochure on social corporate investment and some background about Psitek.
We started the day at a school in the Stellenbosch (Lynedoch) area, where the headmaster shared his enthusiasm with us about educating the children at the school not only on the curriculum, but also on life skills. I shot these two images on the school premises. We took a couple of group shots with the kids, but I had this image in my mind as I felt it shows far more a bond of the children with him than a standard static group picture (though the group pictures were not really static at all). On a technical note, for all the strobist fans. Underexposed sky by about 1 stop and balanced the group with two SB800s on TTL via the built in Nikon CLS.
We moved then into the hall, which was mostly dark. My aim was to get an image that tells a story and not only shows a famous cricket player in front talking. Light was a challenge and time. I used what I had, three SB800s one on the lightstand, I got into the hall just behind Makhaya, another mounted on a chair a few metres to the left of him and another one on top of the camera, which triggered the other two.
The time we spent at the school included lots of running around and setting up lights. I had lots of fun and thinking literally, on my feet was a great challenge and that was only the beginning of the day…
to be continued.
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