Funny how when the lights come on outside (lighting) and the lights go off inside it feels a lot more foreboding than having lights on inside and off outside.

This is one of my favourite places to eat: The Brass Bell in Kalk Bay. This time of year you get the most beautiful moon rises over False Bay. As my girlfriend and I were coming out one night recently, I turned and saw this beautiful picture, and she luckily had her camera on her. Obviously I have played with the colouring, brightness and contrast to bring everything out.

Sometimes there’s nothing you can do but clean up.

Clean up.

I rolled out of bed, even though it was still dark, I grabbed the camera and set up my tri-pod on the balcony to catch some shots of lightning. I have new respect for the guys who photograph storms. I’m not sure what I was doing wrong but I couldn’t seem to get anything decent. Everything looked rubbish and nothing like what you see in NatGeo. I was getting really frustrated, especially by the fact that God seemed to be messing with me by ensuring that every time I looked down to change a setting on the camera a huge bolt would strike in just the place I had been focused a moment ago.

As the storm rolled away I slipped into a sulk because I hadn’t gotten anything useful. I went to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee and sat back down on the balcony as the sun began to rise. Sipping my coffee I began to scroll through all the useless shots I had taken and delete them to free up space on the memory card. Lost in feelings of thwarted creativity, it took me a second to realise that it had suddenly got a lot brighter. I lifted my face to the warm glow in front of me and in one effortless motion pointed the camera at the mountain and got this Biblical-looking shot of the mountain bathed in light, seemingly on fire, as the storms rolls away in the background.

All that effort had yielded nothing, and then when I least expected it, in fact when I had given up, I got a shot that made it all worthwhile.

It was almost as if God was whispering ‘patience’.

It is illegal to use an emergency water supply for civil use.

It is also illegal to deny someone a basic human right.

Access to water is a basic human right.

Do two wrongs make a civil right?

I mean, either you’re “full” or you’re not right? Anything in between is just, well, a little bit grey.

This image took some taking, but I love it’s simple composition – one full, one fully empty, and in a sea of grey. One full divided by one empty is one half made up of two “full”.

I guess that guy was right. You can be full of halfness. 

I was on a wine tour with my brother and his girlfriend in the Stellenbosch region; not sure why because I don’t really like wine. But as we were pulling out of one these beautiful farms I had to yell for him to stop the car, because as I looked out of the back window, back up the driveway, I had this flashback:

I was leaving an ancient farm at the height of Rome’s glory days.

Vines growing in rich, dark soil on a hillside.

The smell of hardy herbs releasing their scent in the warm sun, mixing with the salty tang of sea air.

Rough hewn, stone topped pillars with ornate vases flanking the driveway which leads to the main Domus.

Craggy peaks and brooding clouds providing the backdrop.

The scene triggered something in me and I had to jump out of the car and kneel in the road to snap off this shot.

It felt like a portal to another era.

Timeless.