Gregor Röhrig

This is Ben from the Hartman clan. Ben likes to smudge lenses. Ben is pretty awesome!

I joined MetadorTrips a few weeks ago, a really great online recourse and network for any traveler, and was shortly after contacted by one of their co-editors who saw some of my Zanzibar photographs on my blog. Metador claim to be “the world’s largest independent travel magazine” averaging ±720 000unique monthly visitors.

Needless to say I was very surprised and excited that they requested the best 15 pictures of my Zanzibar collection for a Photo Essay to be published on their site – and here it is:

Enjoy !

Shot with my iPhone in the heart of the Jo’burg CBD. If this image all about self-reflection, what does it actually imply?

I took a few more snaps in the CBD, there are so many interesting and awesome photo opportunities there.

These are only scouting pics for a Jo’Burg CBD photo project that I am busy looking into.

Time to try something different: the challenge now is to take interesting pictures with my iPhone and jazz them up a bit. So the theme for this project will be Vintage Polaroid iPhone Photos…

Click here to see Pictures of the Year 2009…

There are always a variety of photographs that highlight some of the events of the year for me. Some images are humorous, some completely superficial, whilst others are breathtaking, picturesque, serious, violent, and even terrifying.

Boobs and Guns

Let’s start with the humorous – the spoof picture of gun-toting beauty queen, Sarah Palin. The manipulated image, showing Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin posing for a photo sporting an American flag bikini and a rifle became an instant hit when forwarded by millions via email and suitably ridiculed her position within the US Elections.

Ice Cold Vodka

Picture: Platon for TIME

This picture that sends shivers down my spine. Even though it was published on the front cover of Times Magazine in December 2007, for some reason this portrait of Vladimir Putin has haunted me throughout 2008… » Continue Reading…

What is there to know about Pofadder? Well according to Wikitravel not much, or to be even more precise – nothing! Even Wikipedia’s is very vague about the dusty little town:

Pofadder (meaning Puff Adder in English) is a very small town in the Northern Cape region of South Africa. The surrounding districts are arid, sparsely populated, rugged and picturesque. There is little in the way of cropping and local farmers run sheep or goats for a living.

If anybody out there (even in Pofadder) knows more, in terms of some basic stats, like Pofadders’ population or even crime rates, please let me know – I’m intrigued!

To get a better idea about where Pofadder is located, click on the screenshot below, everything else becomes quite self explanatory…

I’ve been going through some old RAW images of mine, in order to re-use them to produce some HDR images.

I didn’t use auto-bracketing for this HDR effect, instead I used a single RAW file and saved three variations of it. I’m not convinced that this is the best way of producing effective HDR images, even though I really like the results.

A couple of months ago I woke up to a loud bang, followed by the siren of a fire engine, which was so deafening it seemed to have woken up right next to me.

The electrical box in the adjacent apartment building exploded and started a fire. The whole commotion had half of Killarney’s inquisitive residents on the street, some in shock and some in awe.

My first instinct was to grab my camera and get a slice of the action – fires have always been a compelling subject matter to me, purely because of the action surrounding it. You have the flames, the heat, the danger. Then you have the firefighters, gearing up, running around, doing all sorts of stuff. And lastly you have the spectators, which are always interesting to watch and to photograph, like these twins, walking past the Killarney fire:

More pictures can be found on my Killarney Fire flickr set, and here is the Animoto version of the event: