Love this one by AltF. Love the lighting, the colour, the mood, the setting...love everything!
My photographer, Tanja, just called me and said that her studio had been broken into and all her camera equipment stolen. While this could have been a calamity for my wedding pics, she had them safely backed up elsewhere. It is, however, pretty awful for her, as she has to replace all that equipment AND lose money for studio shoots that she would have made in the meantime. The reason she phoned was that my wedding photos were actually still on the camera memory card, so some dodgy fucker out there potentially has a copy of all my photos. I'm assuming he just wanted the camera to resell and therefore wiped the lot, but it's a bit of an icky feeling, some creepy bastard looking through all my stuff. So if anyone sees me turn up in an odd place (though I doubt anyone would repost them or even sell them as stock photos, which is what Tanja suggested) please let me know ASAP!
ew that's way yucky! But it makes me question... What part of the world do you live in where Photographer get broken in to, wedding pictures are stolen,and book store need gates on their doors?
ReplyDeleteIs it really that bad in Africa?
Wow. I hate to say it, because you know, you don't want to run down your own home country, but yeah, Johannesburg (in particular) is not safe to live. The bookstore gate is *mostly* to stop petty crime, because there is a huge element of the population that has this feeling that they are entitled to take what they want and to hell with who it belongs to. When I lived in England you could pay for your lunch in the office cafeteria by putting the money you owed into a big tray. Yup, nobody checked that it was the right money, and nobody checked that you didn't steal other money from the tray. This blew my mind because the money would all have been gone within an hour in Johannesburg. At my Dad's work they stopped keeping the free tea, coffee, sugar, milk for the staff because it all got stolen.
ReplyDeleteThe stealing of Tanja's cameras I'm less surprised about, because those things are worth a lot of money and she said they clearly targeted her equipment and nothing else in the studio. BUT she said the police aren't helping her out because they're so corrupt in this country that they're all in cahoots with the pawnshop owners and dodgy sellers of stolen goods. It pisses me off because the police are as corrupt as the government. If you get stopped by a traffic cop they try to make you give them a bribe so they won't give you a ticket. Yip, it happens to everyone.
I have never lived in a house that didn't have a wall taller than me, with some sort of spikes/razor wire/electric fence on top. I wouldn't even consider it. I also wouldn't consider not having an electric gate, because you have to get out your car, making you prime for hijackers. This is how my sister got shot. So yeah...you make sacrifices and live somewhere, because it's where your family, friends, job, everything you know is...and then Sarah comes along and makes a comment and you go "why am I here again?" (Oh right, because it's expensive and scary and a huge gamble to live overseas, and I know I was miserable in the UK because it was so dark and cold all the time)
I'm confused most of the time. We have been back and forth over the moving overseas issue for years. Three quarters of white SA now lives in the UK or Australia or New Zealand, it seems. We'll see.
Now none of you is EVER coming to Joburg! Not that there's anything to see here anyway...go to Cape Town if you ever do come; it's much prettier and feels *slightly* safer.