A tourist adventure turned into a mass photo shoot today.
We met up at 1030 and headed South driving to Cape Point. The highlight of the trip was being stopped by men carrying red flags on the road as a family of baboons were ‘having’ lunch on the highway.
The second highlight was seeing a strange grey furry animal. It was not an otter. It was not anything like a mammal I had seen before. It resembled a live Ewok (from Star Wars) a little. It was like a live teddy bear almost.
They started at myself and Tim as we edged closer with our cameras.
Thanks to Google, they were Cape Hyrax or Rock Hyrax. It was so wired seeing a creature that I have never seen before.
We had some light lunch, then headed back up the coast.
We had been larking around all day with our cameras, suddenly we spotted some young boys playing on a muddy football pitch. Within seconds were parked up and ran towards them. Tim ended up in goal, they all knew of Oliver Kahn, that was his nickname for the next hour.
We took some pictures of them but let them carry on with their soccer skills training before their coaching session later in the afternoon. Each had their own ball. None of the boys would even contemplate kicking another ball, let alone posing with it!
Possibly inspired from looking at Jessica’s fine book yesterday, the afternoon was a joy in just snapping away at these boys playing football. None of them wanted money. None of them were after anything. Just like the boys we game the Wovles shirts to before the World Cup, – 1-day-to-go-charity-work/ – they were all so polite and well mannered, even though they lived in a township and probably had nothing, but equally had everything!
Upon arriving back at the hotel, I spent the next hour playing around with the images. There was no pressure, nothing to think about, just making nice pictures. Although the colours were great, I went back to my darkroom days and recreated some of them in black and white, burning around the edges with a photoshop tool instead of my hand exposing the paper to light.
As the day got on, it got colder and more windy. Heavy rain is forecast tomorrow. We are not looking forward to that. We meet up with Dave and Chris. I have not seem my best buddy for what seems like days! They had been hobnobbing with the likes of Gary Lineker and Alan Hansen. They rolled in at 10.30 this morning!
We decided that we could not go to the same excellent restaurant three days in a row and opted for an Italian. We sat outside, it was cold and windy. The food was OK but was not a patch on last night.
We all went to bed early, we have to start work again tomorrow.
Although today was OK, it was not a game day, but for the soul it was good to shoot some feature pictures and keep some sort of rhythm going.
Football Photographer Blog by Matthew Ashton 
