De Hoop Workshop

My mom, dad & I presented a Workshop in the De Hoop Nature Reserve about an hour from Bredasdorp for a week at the end of September. It is my personal favorite workshop we give & love the diversity of things to shoot, from sea to sand dunes to animals & macro. Unfortunately the weather didn't give us any good macro opportunities, but it did give us some spectacular clouds & was good to get some landscapes again & I often struggle with them if I don't see something that really grabs my attention, but the cloud & light was amazing in every direction, so I went crazy.
We got there a day before the participants to make sure everything was set up & ready to go by the time they arrived. We managed rather quickly & had some time before sunset to go & shoot. I was pretty keen to have fun in an old abandoned house & knew that this would be the only time to try it with our packed program for the week. There are 2 HUGE beehives in the house & many scattered around outside, so I needed to move carefully. I was just fooling around & kept playing until I saw some potential & with all my flashes set up & self timer on I started to work with what was happening & before I knew it it was completely dark, with my patient parents sitting & freezing in the car & didn't want to disturb my in my creative mess, but time came to an end & I got a lil hoot from the car & after having 3 flashes going off all around me in a dark house the packing up was somewhat of a challenge, but I had great fun & that didn't bother me at all & am luckily quite organized, so found everything in the dark quite easily.

The rest of the week was filled with dune, sea & macro/fynbos shoots, having to get up at 4:30am to be in the right place for sunrise & having some great sunset shoots & having enough food to put me in hibernation the rest of the year. We even managed to do some light painting, but I left my camera behind for those & had to be the director & try & co-ordinate 10 people in 3 rooms & get them to understand the techniques & was quite a challenge, but we had loads of fun & people started to understand the importance of playing with photography & laughed like crazy & even managed to get some great results.

Well, as usual here are a few of my shots from the various shoots we had during the week. Was a bit disappointed that we didn't get to do any morning macro on spiderwebs with dew, but the other shoots did more than make up for that.

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