Paul Jacobson

We took a drive to Melrose Arch to see what the Sunflower Fund's 100 000 Photos of Hope exhibition and donor drive. The event's supporters included Nikon South Africa, IVOK, Pix Magazine and the Photo & Film Expo. I'd been thinking about taking my camera out for some exercise (I've been so busy lately I haven't taken many photos outside of my recent shoot for my wife's blog post about making vanilla essence). I thought this would be a great chance to do that and I was right.

When we arrived the Afrikaans band, Wysdiman, was performing in the square outside Moyo. I hadn't heard their music before but they did play the first Afrikaans version of NIN's Hurt (as covered by Johnny Cash) which was pretty cool. I got a little carried away with my photos of the band playing ...

There are quite a few more photos of the band in my Flickr set and in my Google+ Photo album.

Of course the event wasn't all about the one band. It was also about raising funds for the Sunflower Fund by selling photos contributed by both professionals and amateurs. I walked away with 3 great A4 prints home home and my office. I got a kick out of seeing Nikon South Africa's people at the event doing photos of visitors.

Nikon South Africa's Facebook Page has more photos from the event so be sure to take a look. Their photos include this one of me taking photos:

The Sunflower Fund took photo donations from photographers to stock this exhibition and I am definitely going to donate a couple of my photos for the next event, whenever that is.

This Zuma painting debacle is becoming sickening. An artist paints a work that criticises the president and the response is outrage and an implicit insistence that the president is beyond reproach and criticism. Today two people protest the painting in a bold but non-violent protest by defacing it (and apparently ruining it) and their protest is met with violence by security which failed to prevent the defacement in the first place.

The irony is that the security guard's response, while it's probably what he is trained and paid to do, is a physical expression of what the ANC is trying to do in Court this week. Why didn't the gallery take more proactive steps to protect the painting from an inevitable protest like this? This was foreseeable and there must have been ways to stop this from happening. Instead we have this violent response to a protest action where a camera just happened to be rolling (boy, that does seem a little contrived).

I certainly didn't see the younger guy resisting the security guard or trying to evade capture. What I saw was a disproportionate response to an act that could have been avoided or certainly handled better.

My wife is making vanilla essence and she asked me to take some photos of the process for her. Here are a couple photos straight off my camera. She'll publish the edited set on her blog when her post is done but I thought I'd share these few as a preview (Update: Gina's post is up at You Cook What? so go take a look at her recipe for vanilla essence.

This is probably my first food shoot so I guessed a lot about which perspectives to take photos from and how to shoot the stuff. Let me know if you have any suggestions? We'll do the rest of the photos when Gina is done with the process. My photos are up on Flickr if you'd like to take a look. Feedback is most welcome!

I noticed that my delegated calendars in my work Google Calendar account were not showing up in my iPhone's and iPad's calendar app. These calendars are shared calendars that I use for team meetings and so on. I keep them separate from my main calendar. I battled to find a solution until I found this solution in the Apple Support Forum:

Was experiencing the same problem. Was using Exchange calendars with delegates. I just updated my iPad and just received iPhone 4s. Delegate calendars do show on iPad but not on iPhone 4s. Exact same calendar account settings on both. Thought it must be some glitch in iOS5.0 for iPhone. Decided to change iPhone back to GoogleSync for delegates. Just had to go to https://www.google.com/calendar/iphoneselect and choose which calendars to sync. Disabled my original Exchange account on iPhone. All sorted now.

It works! Problem solved.

I saw Avengers again this afternoon at the Prestige theatre at Ster Kinekor, The Zone in Rosebank. It is a 3D theatre and is the SLOW lounge of movie theatres.

Very fancy, very nice and worth trying at least once or twice. It costs R85 per ticket and I'm not sure what the Discovery Vitality discount is.

Is anyone using Lightroom to manage a photo library? I've been using Picasa but I am considering switching my habit to Lightroom to manage my libraries (I already using Lightroom for all my photo editing).

I need to be able to manage photos on multiple drives which preferably update dynamically (I know I can also do an import to refresh the folders). I'd also like to upload easily to Picasa (I use Picasa for online photo storage), Flickr and Facebook. I know about some plugins that do that but any recommendations would be great.

I'm pretty sure this is possible but I'm interested in your experiences if you are using Lightroom like this.

We went to Hout Bay one of the days we were in Cape Town for our April 2012 holiday. This is one of the videos I shot while we were there. Just a short video of what is probably a common sight: