Mandela gets a Grammy

The Soweto Gospel Choir meet with Nelson Mandela at his foundation in Johannesburg to show him their Grammy they won for best traditional world music album.Everytime I shoot Nelson Mandela, the light is brutal, there is a bunch of photographers, TV guys and a few reporters with stars in their eyes. It's always a bit of a squeeze... the ruck, as I refer to it, where everyone jossles for the best position before he comes out, but as soon as he does everything changes and the good positions become bad, so my strategy is to simply wait at the back and shoot through all the heads...

It's worked everytime so far.

Paris in Alberton

I was really disappointed with a local national newspaper this Saturday, I was at the My Coke Fest concert on Friday night with Stars that included 30 Seconds to Mars (may I add, the girls seem to love the Hollywood movie star posing as a rocker with a black guitar, swearing every two seconds, wearing guyliner, and thinking that makes him rock and roll, but thats another story), the Kaiser Chiefs,
Good Charlotte, Muse, Chris Cornell and Korn... So, who do they run on their front page, #@$%ing Paris Hilton on the side of the stage taking a photo of her soon to be ex-boyfriend/ ex-husband/ film-producer...

So, not to be outdone, here's a pic that I took of Ms Hilton about to take a picture of her soon to be ex-boyfriend/ ex-husband/ film producer...

The rock that made me roll.

After busy days on Thursday and Friday, I decided to relax, take some pics of animals at a nature reserve just outside Johannesburg.

This place is real nice, with tigers, cheetahs, white lions, rhinos, hippos, you name it.

I got some real nice shots, but what really sticks out from my day is the cheetah, I had The Citizen's 300mm F2.8, which is a big lens, and was taking a few shots of this cheetah when something seemed to rustle its feathers, so to speak. It got very angry, hissed, and the hair on its back stood on end, not wanting to lose the shot, I kept the camera to my eye and started to run for a new angle and ran straight into a very large rock, smacked my shins real hard and ended up rolling in the dirt. I manged to save the lens, but my legs were not that lucky.

I haven't had shins that sore since I was a youngster pretending to be good at skateboarding. I can just imagine that damn cheetah having a good laugh to himself.

Now I'm even boring myself.

You'll notice that I have quite a few entries on my blog complaining about the attitude of the police towards media - specifically me, I even thought to myself recently that I'm going to try not write too much about that anymore, but this ones a bit too hectic for me to ignore, as I find that the cops are constantly trying their best to hinder the media in their duties.

At a traffic accident, to stop me taking pictures Ekurhuleni Traffic Authority police jumped on me, choked me, bashed my head off the ground, kicked me, handcuffed me, locked me in the back of a very hot car for about an hour...
then they charged me with assault of all things.

I'm wondering if Ekurhuleni Traffic Authority police regard stopping a man from throttling you, as assault, anyway... chucked in police cells with a couple of house breakers, a thief, an illegal gun owner, a wife beater, and a man that I later found out murdered a man with a panga.

So, that was my day, it started out so well yet got so bad, so fast...

You'll also notice theres no pic with this entry, that's because I never got much of a chance to get a decent one, I was too busy getting roughed up, so sorry about that...

There's always one.

Police work on the scene of a cash-in-transit robbery in Malvern near Johannesburg.
There's always one, isn't there! When I get to this scene, I'm standing outside the crime scene-as I always do, I then hear this guy shout at me "WHO ARE YOU!", I duly tell him, he then decides he wants to fight, not being one to back down I proceed to take pics. This guy just carries on, damnnit, the guy would not shut the hell up, telling me his name is Koosie, (shock!), even though he is not even a cop, he works for Group 4 Securicor, I tell him to back off, and do his job as I am doing mine, then for some reason -he felt it appropriate to throw a fifty cent coin at me, I'm sure he needs it more than I do , but anyway. He thought it was funny, I guess.The cops couldn't be bothered this time, simply doing their job, so this time, unlike the last umpteen times, it was just some random idiot and not a cop hassling me.
You can't win, it seems.