Johannesburg

No time to enjoy this crumbling Melville splendour. Leaving eJozi early. So wonderful to see @sophdex and @ezlemoen though.

A #latergram of an Indian takeaway feast in the Jozi home of our dear friends @sophdex and @ezlemoen with parents, Jill and Pierre, and collies, airedales, and cats. Johannesburg doesn’t look nearly as welcoming in spring compared to summer. But get indoors and the citizens (not just our friends) are as friendly as ever. Shooting scenes like this in available darkness is a big part of what makes having a fast wide-angle lens such a pleasure.

Another one of Hillbrow from Constitution Hill in Jan 2019. I took this with a lens not much newer than these flats - a Nikkor 105mm f2.5 from the ’70s. Such a killer lens. Anyone using Nikon SLRs or DSLRs should try get one. They’re not very expensive. Wonderful cheap portrait lens for full-frame - flattening features and separating from the background with its shallow depth-of-field at f2.5. And I found endless other uses for it too. ...

#jozi My dad has been posting some of his pics from Hilbrow and Berea in the 1960s when he lived there. This is Hilbrow now. It doesn’t look like all that much to people in many places around the world - really just some grubby 50s-70s high-rises. But Johannesburg is unique in Africa for having a true ‘urban jungle.’ Nowhere else has such a concentration of tall buildings - not Cairo. Not Lagos. It was all built on the gold dug far beneath the Earth by workers treated as less-than second-class citizens sweltering in the darkness. ...

Xmas looking out over the Melville koppie. Loads of fancy bushveld birds abound.

Scenes from ghostly Jozi streets.

We have made it to lovely Jozi with thunder, great friends, gin, collies, and pink flamingos.

Johannesburg is the only true urban space in Africa - with blocks and blocks of towers so that you can walk for ages only seeing the sky as strips above your head. Other big cities like Lagos and Cairo are mostly flat sprawls.

Joburg does traffic… and weather… way more intensely than Cape Town. Soundtrack worked out nicely 😂.