[applause]
And enjoy your visit!
Vince
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«A nomadic blog oscillating between New York, Vancouver and Cape Town, gathering HDR photos and jotting notes along the way»
Not all is ever smooth and peachy with Cape Town’s weather. Table Mountain acts as an incredible torturer of skies, focusing the impact of conflicting air masses and unleashing strange downdrafts and pouring rains unto the city it dwarfs.
Below is an example. Approaching from the south and stuck in slow-moving traffic, we had ample time to marvel the mountain’s magnificent impact on every aspect of the city’s mood.
Back in January this year, when the Southern Cross was still filling our South African nightly skies and the FIFA World Cup was no more than a distant 
future thrill, we took the trusted Kombi for a drive around False Bay. Leaving Cape Town behind, we crossed the Cape Flats, zipped through Somerset West and wound our way along the edge of Cape Hangklip towards Betty’s Bay.
The ocean was just delightfully turquoise and the sky streaked by rare cumulus. As always when exploring South Africa, we saw our share of wildlife. From the top of a hill, I spotted a great white shark cruising near a rocky shore, less than half a mile from a beach where surfers paddled through wave sets.
Then in Betty’s Bay we visited yet another South African penguin colony, less idyllic than the one in Boulder’s Bay, but as prolific and definitely smellier. I haven’t yet gotten over my surprise of mingling with the comical birds in a 
temperate environment. With my eyes half-closed, I could almost pretend that the sun-bleached and guano-covered rocks were in fact ice and snow. There was something odd to the scene, as if a giant blunder had been done at the Creation level and a drop of arctic life had splashed into African heat.
But the penguins seemed well-adjusted and happy, and despite relative tourist activity and the clicking of cameras, they just didn’t mind our presence and did what penguins do best: mostly nothing.
Read 66 Square Feet for a more extensive post about the drive.
The terrace is beautiful and lush, but its 66 square feet don’t allow for much movement or lookout. At dinner, crossing my legs is a challenge and the Japanese grass keeps tickling my back. So once in a while we climb to the roof 
and picnic there, among satellite dishes, skylights and chimneys, with the wind in our face and the lifeless old windows of the hospital building for our only top neighbors.
The cat comes and joins us after a little coaxing. This is his kingdom and at first, he is reluctant to share it. We sit facing the Orient, spread one kikoi as a seat and another for a table, and we eat our feast watching the sky and the planes and the rising stars. To the west, the New York Harbour basin shines in the vanishing light and we can see ferries dance back and forth between Manhattan and the islands.
The Battery Tunnel building immortalized in Men in Black stands strongly in the center stage, brightly lit and massive. In the background and to the left, a short Lady Liberty tiredly lifts her flame into a world of overwhelming obstacles to her stance.
Not for a minute are we allowed to forget where we are as the invisible BQE highway sends a continuous low-pitch roaring towards us, major player in what we call the New York hum, the ever-present surrounding noise typical of large cities and 
whose absence strikes us as so incredibly wonderful when we get to such heavenly places as the Namib Desert or Table Mountain.
A few feet behind us is the Farm. Marie’s new horticultural effort has rapidly grown from modest experimental proportions to a full-fledged potager and we are watching with fascinated anticipation as our vegetables grow hurriedly in the summer heat.
Eventually, when night has fallen and our wine dried up, the plates empty and all stomachs content, we squeeze back down the trap door and into the welcoming light of our apartment. The cat follows from the outside, rounding the terrace and glancing nonchalantly at the street below, and he comes into the room with the manners of a king returning from the Crusades, victorious, hungry and tired, and after assessing the fleeting possibility of more food donations, he chooses a sleeping spot for the night and settles in.
If anyone wants to know what I think, bad football was played today in Jo’Burg, between two teams that did not show World Cup final flare. Nothing impressive, no brilliant moves, an incredible number of bad kicks and missed opportunities, too much pushing, pulling and falling, too much acting, too much pretending, and very questionable arbitration.
I’d say the referee did a pitiful job at controlling the field and preventing fouls, and showed poor judgment first handing out a mere yellow card for a foot smacked right into a chest and later a brutal red one for a fault that did not even really show contact when replayed in slow motion, but which changed the outcome of the match.
Like in a cheap video game, Spain won after close to 120 minutes of poor gameplay, that’s all. Shame. Yawn.
In a little over 24 hours, the eyes of the world will focus on a single football, as an estimated* half a billion fans watch the FIFA World Cup final live from even the most remote corners of Earth. No broadcast event on the planet manages to capture the interest of so many people simultaneously.
I personally think that FIFA is too large a beast, probably rotten by corruption and in the simple business of making sheer profit. If as little as 5 percent of the advertising time it sells to major sponsors for what must be astronomical sums was instead given to charity organizations with an international scope - or, why not, to those serving the continent in which the Cup is being played - then some real good could come from the event. It should be the duty of any highly successful enterprise to give back to society, as much for a balance in operations and avoidance of the capital sin of greed as for simple and effective self-promotion purposes, and I believe that FIFA could shine better at this.
In any case, South Africa has been receiving more worldwide attention in the last few weeks than ever before, and that should be a good thing. The country will now have appeared in the awareness of many who previously ignored it and stands to gain from exposure and the success of a brilliantly hosted Cup.
But there is so much more to South Africa than frantic 
crowds in a stadium pulsating to the sound of vuvuzelas. It would be a terrible mistake for any World Cup spectator to so limit their exploration of a newly discovered country. I hope that those who attended in person will have gone off the beaten path and sampled the less traveled roads and beaches. I hope they will have strolled and walked and hiked. I hope they will have smelled the flowers and tasted the sea salt, and enjoyed wonderful food and superb wine. I hope they will have taken in the crisp light and absorbed the peace.
And for those who visited through a TV set, may their imagination and curiosity be tickled into picking up a South African novel, watching another documentary, Googling the origin of a word or even, why not, toying with the idea of a call to the travel agent.
South Africa is a land of extremes, and while not everything is rosy and pretty down there, I know of very few places anywhere on the globe that will fill the traveler with such a sense of wonder and amazement.
Here are a few snapshots of a wonderful family picnic on 3rd Beach in Clifton, the same beach that saw Marie and I drinking Champagne on a memorable afternoon two years ago. It has a sweet spot in our hearts, of course, but truly is a beautiful enclave of sand and ocean, nestled at the foot of Lion’s Head, a few minutes from the heart of Cape Town.
Now let the game be fair and may the best team win.
* Half a billion is a very conservative figure taking into account the recent admission by FIFA that their previous numbers may have been largely overestimated.
I’m not one to celebrate nor appreciate National and Independence days much, whether a 4th of July, a 14th or a 1st. While people drink and party, I tend to ponder. It is so easy to raise a flag high and forget the atrocities that have led us where we are. I do not feel that ancient blood baths are anything worth celebrating, especially when they are actually being perpetrated all over again on some distant land. If anything, a day of mourning and remembrance would be more appropriate. To feel sorry for a necessary evil and convince ourselves we have grown. But have we?
This 4th of July was equal to itself. I worked most of the week-end and had to deal with drunks and fights. The fights were fueled by ideology conflict, intolerance and latent racism. If a country’s national holiday meant anything serious, one would think that the masses would find something more intelligent to do than get trashed.
And was I in France, I wouldn’t look forward any more to the upcoming 14th of July, for exactly the same reasons.
In any case, a walk along the Brooklyn Promenade with Marie was uneventful and I managed to get a nice-ish shot of our Manhattan skyline from the new park in Brooklyn. Peace to all.
While temperatures creep up and the Big Apple slowly fries under an unrelenting sun, the mercury having just busted a cruel 100°F (38°C) mark, it is sweet and a bit surreal to remember that last year, those were the brutal conditions we faced in Namibia and South Africa’s Kgalagadi National Park.
More recently though, but just as hard to believe, we were having drinks on a Cape Town beach with loved ones and friends, celebrating the impending Cape Argus Cycle Tour - and despite the season and location, summer nights were chilly and Marie had wrapped herself in a Grand Cafe blanket. This is the irony of the weather. It’s never what you want it to be.
South of Cape Town, all the way down the Cape Peninsula, part of the Table Mountain National Park and next to Cape Point, is the famous Cape of Good Hope, southernmost part of the peninsula and often (falsely) labeled as the bottom tip of Africa.
First rounded in 1488 by Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias, 
the cape was initially named Cape of Storms and certainly has claimed its share of wrecks. Just a mile offshore, the warm Agulhas current coming down from the Indian Ocean clashes violently with its cold counterpart the Benguela as it heads up the western coast of Africa to a foggy rendez-vous with the Namib Desert.
Some tales claim that the legendary ghost ship Flying Dutchman was doomed to eternally sail the ocean while attempting to round the Cape into Table Bay. When looking out to sea from such harsh, desolate shores, it isn’t hard to imagine the sailors fighting against mother nature’s fury in the darkest of nights, the wind hauling through torn sails and waves crashing down on decks with maddening strength.
Yet on a sunny afternoon, as we walked down from the Cape Point parking lot with our picnic, leaving the crowds behind and entering a world of high cliffs and sandy perfection, peace was all around and soon inside of us, too. The many wooden stairs leading down to a secluded little bay just east of Cape Maclear are steep and high enough to deter most tourists and we found ourselves just about alone once we got to the bottom.
The wind was blowing steadily and we first sought shelter from the sun in the shadow of one of the great stone walls. Swimming is reputedly dangerous in the area, with strong undertows and ripping currents lurking in very cold water, but we 
wet our feet and walked the length of the beach before picnicking in the shade.
This is the magic of Cape Town. Less than an hour away from the city, in all directions, exist many oasis of pure, undiluted beauty, where one can be alone and feel like the real world has disappeared beyond a horizon of a thousand years of tranquility.
There are very few places in the world that carry as much romantic symbolism as the Cape of Good Hope. Standing there and looking out into the ocean is a bit like staring into the future and the past simultaneously.
There is nothing beyond but empty space and while at your back sits the hungriest, hottest and most tortured continent on the planet, the ocean in front seems to be calling for a truce, for a fresh start, offering a level playing field in which all men can measure themselves by the only value worth governing the world: courage.
In 1994, when Apartheid fell, black South Africans must have seen their hopes soar far beyond barbed-wire fences and absolute repression. Everything was suddenly possible. The world, their world, had just become a better place.
Some 15 years later, as I ventured last March into Khayelitsha, second largest township in the 
country after Soweto, I was forced to admit that if the world had become a better place, this wasn’t it. In the long, painful transition from radical racism to relative freedom, something, somehow, had gone terribly wrong.
Cape Town, jewel of the Western Cape and arguably one of the most beautiful cities in the world, is surrounded on all sides by extremely poor neighborhoods called townships. Khayelitsha was established in 1985 to deal with illegal settlement on the Cape Flats and after initially being populated by forceful relocation, it eventually became a top destination for willing settlers in search of work and education.
The numbers are quite staggering. As of 2010, an estimated 900,000 live in and around Khayelitsha. It is composed of three different kinds of dwellings, categorized as formal, informal and illegal informal. The former are also called Mandela houses; they are single-room, often brick-and-mortar, small rectangular houses built by the authorities after Mandela promised housing for the people. They usually have power and water.
Informal settlements are given a very basic lot-based water supply in the form of a toilet shack with a water tap and people are left to build their living quarters around, either in solid materials or tin sheets.
Last and least, illegal settlements appear here and there, often on public space such as highway sides and have no utilities whatsoever. If I remember correctly, the law states that they must be displaced by the authorities within 90 days or they become legal.
The very disturbing thing about townships is that, just like in our 
fancy First World cities even if on totally different scales, extreme poverty can be seen clashing with relative wealth. Satellite dishes abound. Electricity is either distributed officially or tapped into illegally but TV’s are part of the township’s everyday life and the outside world erupts into each house, riding on radio waves and full of unattainable glamor.
Our guide Thabang, good friend and son of Selina, one of the nicest, kindest woman I know on this silly little planet of ours, runs a small tour company, Ezizwe Travel and Tours. He has specialized in township tours, having been brought up in one himself. For hours, he drove us in and around Khayelitsha in his Volkswagen Kombi, trying to give us a sense of what life can be for 90% of the South African population.
I am not sure I got it. It was all very surreal. The daily existential reality in townships is so far remote from my own experience of life that I could at best stare and wonder. Understanding would take months if not years. Accepting, even longer.
The daily existential reality in townships is so far remote from my own experience of life that I could at best stare and wonderMarie and I were also quite uncomfortable with the very reason for our presence. It wasn’t voyeurism, we had actually dreaded the visit for some time. But having never truly explored a township, we felt like our South African experience was that of ostriches, our heads firmly stuck into the sand, refusing hard to see the darkest side of things and focusing solely on a very privileged white-only way of life.
But as we cruised through the townships, stopping here and there to interact with locals under the very calculated supervision of our guide and watched as he rewarded them on the spot with small amounts of money, turning our visit into a tourism initiative and their hospitality into simple business deals, we couldn’t help but to feel embarrassed and guilty.
Despite a thorough awareness of the potential benefits of tourism for any undeveloped, poor or isolated area, I felt like the visitor of a zoo or circus. The township limits are indeed a cage, no longer restricting movement but certainly locking out opportunity. Such a cage must make for endless sadness and the likely eradication of free will, a combination likely to tame the wildest people.
We visited Vicky’s B&B, a 
modest yet well furnished bed and breakfast, set right in the middle of the township and obviously catering to the most adventurous visitors. They had internet and a plasma TV, won in some contest and placed in the center of the common room. A girl gave us a well rehearsed speech about the premises and encouraged donations. The effort was there.
We drank locally brewed beer in a dark shack with a row of men sitting opposite us on low benches, watching us from the shadows with impenetrable gazes, as the huge beer bucket ritually got passed around the room and we were forced to take a single sip of the warm, frothy and bitter liquid than had absolutely nothing in common with the beer I know. Thabang explained that one paid R6 (under a dollar US) when first walking in and would then be allowed to return all day and drink. It cost R12 on week-ends. Marie remarked aloud that visiting on a week day was smarter. The men cracked up.
We paid a short visit to Ndaba, a Langa sangoma (or medicine man) who has setup his practice inside a container that’s become completely overtaken by hundreds of bizarre objects and potions. Marie bravely spoke to him about dreams and he dispensed his wisdom while waving a sacred switch through the air. When we left, men outside his door were trying to sell us souvenirs. One of them, sizing us up with highly trained eyes, saw my 200m Titanium Citizen Promaster dive watch and commented on it. We were back in modern times.
We watched ladies skinning, glazing and roasting sheep heads in the fierce sun, surrounded by blue smoke and the many undisclosed smells of poverty and decayWe watched ladies skinning, glazing and roasting « smileys » in the fierce sun, surrounded by blue smoke and the many undisclosed smells of poverty and decay. The smileys are discarded sheep heads obtained from local slaughterhouses for pennies and later sold at a profit, a fully cooked head costing R17.
We visited a school and interrupted a class or two, politely greeted by kids in clean uniforms. I noticed very old computers in a corner. This was one of very few such schools. Dozens of kids attended. I have no idea what the remaining hundreds of thousands do with their days.
Marie and I both carried our cameras but were basically paralyzed. Neither one of us has much journalism training and we let our feelings and self-consciousness come before the requirements for matter-of-factly recording of our visit. The very few photos that accompany this post paint a rather incomplete picture of the townships. Some were taken earlier in the trip while driving through on the highway, much like taking pictures of the 
Keys from a plane and pretending to have been to Florida.
I am left with a feeling of unease, and sadness. The tour was incredibly instructive. It was terribly depressing. It probably didn’t make any difference at all. We contributed a few dollars to the work of local craftsmen, and a few more, via Thabang, to the emerging tourism scene. So much remains to be changed. So little exists now to inspire township inhabitants, to let them hope and dream of practical goals rather than of mythical ones.
Apartheid might have been defeated but it left a legacy of chaos and high crime that many equate to having changed a dollar for four quarters. The racial barriers still stand, not so much in law and politics as on economic, demographic, geographic and social levels. The vast majority of South Africa’s black and colored people remain poor and uneducated. They are still hurting. They merely have acquired the right to do so freely.
Below are the humbling results of my first video shoot with the Canon 7D. It’s all quite laughable, really, since I am a complete amateur in this domain - and yet somehow, it feels promising and rather exciting, like the tip of an iceberg, its mass awaiting for me to commit, dive and explore...
Please keep in mind that while the 10 minute long, 50 MB streaming video below is highly compressed and shrunk to the Flash format, the H.264 full-1080p HD MPEG4 original is almost 1 GB in size. You are only getting a cheap preview of the amazing quality now achieved by video DSLR’s. The full-size footage actually outperforms DVD quality. If some of you have an HD TV or Blue Ray player, that’s more like it...
So, this was two weeks ago. I had set out to Coney Island for an afternoon, attempting to record glimpses of the place, its strangeness, its people, the recently reopened Luna Park, the ocean nearby, all soaking in a mixture of summer and heat and seaside smells.
Apart from the camera, I do not own much in terms of video-making equipment. Obviously that’s a serious handicap because if still photography requires very little extra gear, videography on the other hand demands for a considerable load of specialized tools to even dream of perfection. We are talking tripods, dollies, lights, grips, stabilizers, LCD screens, microphones, booms, etc.
Me, I’ve purchased a very reasonable Azden SMX-10 directional microphone, not being financially ready for a Rode VideoMic - and a little disheartened by its size. That day on Coney Island was quite windy and the SMX-10’s foam windscreen fought hard to keep the sound clear. I might have to double it up. Bottom line is, I’m better off than with the camera’s on-board mono microphone but still far from great audio.
Then there is the issue of fluid panning. While my Manfrotto tripod and the ballhead are fantastic for still photography, they do not replace a video head and make for rather lousy camera motion. Practice will help. In the meantime, I try to tighten the head just to the point where it starts seizing up, back down a touch, and hold the camera firmly while panning.
Of course, I made big initial mistakes, and learned a lot from them. My clips were all too short. I was filming for the scene duration I envisioned in the final movie and did not allow for editing and transitions. Note to self: add at least 5 seconds prior and after each clip.
Also, when it came to filming the guitar player, I only shot short clips one after the other, which means that at editing time I didn’t have a soundtrack to work with. I will not make that mistake again. Any time a soundtrack is necessary or interesting, I will first shoot a long uninterrupted clip for its audio, and then short additional clips from different angles - provided of course that the audio doesn’t change in between. This means that to film a song, for instance, I should probably spend about a third to half of its duration recording sound, and the rest shooting various angles. It’s nothing like filming a scene simultaneously with two cameras but hey, it’ll have to do...
My shutter speed was all over the place, too. With frame rate set to 30 fps (actually 29.97), I was experimenting with high speeds but as expected they make the footage look very synthetic, almost stroboscopic. I will now stick to the conventional 1/60th to 1/125th and step down my aperture accordingly, which will mean somewhere down the line investing in more neutral density filters to reduce depth of field in bright light.
The lenses performed well. My new 10-22mm makes for great wide-angle shots but logically doesn’t allow me to blur backgrounds much. The 55-250mm, however, even with a mere f4 maximum aperture, does a great job at this. Some of the shots have a rather movie-like limited depth of field, and the ability to shift focus forward or backwards inside of a scene, like when I clumsily went from the hands of the guitar player to the strange man in a white hat behind him, is just fantastic.
So just give me plenty more practice, a really interesting subject, lots of time at the editing table and I should be able to keep you all entertained... For now, turn your volume up, click on the thumbnail below and smile indulgently.
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« I love these pictures, #4 especially - but the last two very much as well: not something one often sees, captured. I like the traffic and container component. »
Date of comment: 2010-07-26 12:44 • Reply