This past Tuesday I was the official photographer for a workshop event for GHD, which all the ladies reading this will know is the hair styling iron that has become the de facto industry standard. The folks at GHD put on a roadshow where they invited 100 of the top hair stylists in the area to get hands on training with their new GHD Platinum product, as well as live demonstrations from one of the UK’s top hair stylists, namely Dafydd Rhys Thomas.
The day was split into two 2-hour sessions and was held at a venue just down the road from me, but which I had never heard of before, namely The Ricksha. What a cool venue! What these guys have done is taken a old warehouse/workshop (that was once the place where Durban’s famous beachfront Ricksha’s were stored and repaired) and converted it into a massive open plan venue that has been used for art exhibitions, fine dining experiences and of course corporate events like the one I was photographing for GHD. The venue, while appealing in a grungy sort of gentrified way, also makes for some excellent photographic light. I managed to shoot the entire 7 hours and only used my flash once, when I was shooting into the GHD “selfie wall” which had been placed up against one of the big windows. While that window lit up the branded backdrop wonderfully from behind, it created havoc for the camera metering system, so unless you used flash it was either going to be photos of silhouettes, or photos of a massively overblown background where the GHD branding would not even be visible. Dealing with that kind of situation is one of the things that separates professional photographers from people who buy expensive cameras and call themselves photographers. You have to know your lighting and you have to know your cameras. For the second session they moved the selfie branding up against a solid wall so that the cellphone users weren’t overly perplexed by this backlighting situation. :)
Anyway, I was there for 7 hours and I got some great shots using a variety of lenses on my Olympus cameras, as well as making excellent use of my Peak Design support system gadgets and straps.
Below are some of the shots I liked most from the day.
