Saturday morning on the Durban beachfront during the 2010 soccer world Cup.

It’s always a good thing to spend Christmas Day with family. This year we spent it with my wife’s family here in South Africa – hopefully next year we can spend it with my brother and his family in Australia.

So, eventually after a whole year of long days and late nights, Tyler emerged victorious as a qualified chef and was 3rd overall in his class! Well done, son!

I took a few photos at the graduation luncheon held at Fusion Cooking school in Westville.

Class Of 2009	Tyler Getting his Diploma and medal
Tyler & Leigh

I first heard the name Dan Patlansky about 5 or 6 years ago from my friend John, who sold me my first guitar and told me that if I enjoyed the blues I really ought to go and see Dan playing live. I didn’t think much of it at the time and in passing I mentioned it to my then guitar teacher, who being something of a maestro himself, also suggested that I should go and see him play. It took another two years before that eventually happened, but when it did I swear I thought I was hearing Stevie Ray Vaughn reach back into this world from the other side. Oh my, this boy can play!

A year or so after my first Dan Patlansky gig I got to take some photos of him playing an in-store set at the opening of my friend John’s music store. The lighting was God-awful (fluorescent tubes) and the store was packed with fans who’d pushed aside the regular drudgery of a Saturday morning to come and see this blues prodigy play a few numbers. Despite the throng of people I somehow got myself near the front and armed only with a D2H, SB-800 and 18-200mm VR lens I managed to get some shots of Dan that I was pretty happy with. Dan must have liked them too as I see he is using a couple of them on his Facebook profile! (more…)

I haven’t photographed any sports for quite a few years, but decided to take a walk to the N3 on Comrades Day to exercise my new camera, the Nikon D700. With every shot I am amazed at the image quality. The sensor on this camera is just incredible! If I had tried to get some of these backlit shots using my D200 I’d be pounding my head against the wall in Photoshop, but with the D700 it’s almost like shooting fish in a barrel.

The camera is very complex though. There are 444 pages in the manual and if you don’t read up on various things you can become frustrated very easily. The menus are huge and the customisation available is staggering! I can assign so many different functions to various buttons that it almost becomes like an application programming interface.

I am massively grateful to Nikon Corporation for making such a brilliant piece of equipment and to Nikon SA for their support in getting it to me.

Another shoot for Floordom. The objective here is to emphasize the relationship between the floor and the surroundings. These images will be used in print advertising and on the clients website.

Diningroom

Kitchen Island

Kitchen Traffic Area

If I look back on some of the websites I have created for my photography in the past I am immediately struck with just how much progress I have made as a designer. Two years ago I had been creating sites for almost 10 years yet I still had no real understanding of the power of CSS or dynamic databases. That’s obviously changed, but the single biggest discovery I have made in the past two years has undoubtably been WordPress. The changes you see made to the site today are all efected in a couple of hours using the power of WordPress and its CSS files. Total power…

Anyway, I digress. As you may have noticed I am no longer promoting website design on this site. That doesn’t mean that I am not designing websites anymore, on the contrary I have simply decided to split that aspect of what I do away from my photography. So now I have two websites, each devoted to its own area of expertise. This one is for photography and www.dallasdahms.net is for website design and hosting.

I seem to have become really busy on the photography front in the past month, which is great. I’ve also simplified my offerings and what you see on the site today kind of boils everything down nicely. I intend spending much more time doing photography in the future.

Some images taken from a shoot I did for 34 Brand Activation Agency (on behalf of Grand Slots) last week:

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As a direct result of the sudden loss of the Rand’s value against the US Dollar, I have no choice but to change my pricing for hosting packages and domain names (new and renewals) to reflect in US Dollars.

With immediate effect all pricing will be as follows:

Club 1000 hosting packages – $100 per annum.

International domain names – $10 per annum.

Should you wish to purchase either of these products the prevailing exchange rate will apply when paying via EFT. Alternatively please make use of your credit card and pay for these services using the facilities I have on www.dallasdahms.net.

I do apologise for the inconvenience.

Important Message:

HATE SPEECH ABOUT ME FOUND ON VARIOUS WEBSITES

If you have Googled my name and been quite shocked to read some rather outrageous things written about me, please rest assured that they are not true in any way, shape or form!

Several years ago I was an active member of the rec.photo usenet newsgroups where unfortunately a couple of trolls went on the warpath against not only me, but many other contributors to the groups. This hate speech went on for several months unabated and despite our best efforts to identify the perpetrator it became impossible to do so as they were using anonymous proxies to engage in this behaviour. It still continues to this day on rec.photo.equipment.35mm and other groups I was once a member of.

Unfortunately many websites are now perpetuating the slander because the usenet archives can be freely incorporated into browser based forums. Webmasters do this to fill their databases with more content, thus obtaining higher search engine rankings. Because there is so much content on usenet it isn’t possible for them to actively screen all of it, so the wild and wacky things these trolls have stated online keep popping up.

There isn’t a lot I can do about it except ask people who encounter it to please use their common sense and consider the source.

Sample product photographs from dD Studio. My studio is equipped to provide top quality product imagery. I currently do product photos for LexisNexis Publishing house as well as GM Pharmaceuticals.

Please contact me for a quote on your product photo needs.