- Essential olive-infused CBD fruit oil from the community gardens of La Marou
- Found art earrings by Fontanella Parchesa
- Twice-spun silk gilet from Plok+Raya’s pre-2021 androgynous range
- Marshall Tupping’s fair-trade rayon face masks with bouclé ear ties
- Ready-to-bake vegan banana bread panettone, packed in a copper hat box, from Rosamund’s on Seventh
- Jemima Inigo’s disinfectant spray gifting box, Artesian Safari edition.
- Limited release Purdy von Xanthe refillable Le Chiquito-sized hand sanitiser carafe
- Mink-lined Zoom slippers from Octavia Company
- Inside-Outside summer pyjama set from Dagny Morgan (order ten weeks in advance for personalised pocket embroidery)
- ZenSourcePlus wireless dalgona maker with premium app and 12 months support
- Triple-stranded mood-enhancement wrist band with interchangeable Emotion Inserts TM from Montgomery Works
- $500 digital voucher entitling the bearer to ten custom video-conferencing backgrounds
Finding Closure in Bewildering Times
I come from a community who gathers.
But in this time of distance, there are only solitary rituals to mourn those who pass.
We can’t sit next to each other, pass supaarahs from hand to hand.
In each of our spaces, we can only hold our own grief up to the air.— saaleha i bamjee (@saaleha) May 9, 2020
Mostly, the call would come after midnight or just before the dawn prayer. You’d know what’s on the other side of that line. There would be a cloak set aside for this purpose, socks, shoes that slip on and off quickly, a small bag to hold tissues and a prayer counter. You’d find parking down the street, walk past the throngs of men standing outside the house, the older ones sitting on plastic garden chairs. You’d greet the ones you know, offer a sombre nod to the son or the father or the brother or the uncle. Inside the house, you’d acknowledge the family who see you, pick up a suparah from the unread pile, claim a spot on the blanket close to the one who’s passed on, or in another room if the familial relation is too extended. You’d read the Arabic, you’d offer up the prayers, you’d consider the weight of loss – how it is that the negative of someone can become an unwieldy mass, but here you all are carrying together in the quiet. You’d bring the tissues up to your nose, to your eyes. And when the dead leave the house on the shoulders of men, the Fatiha in their wake, you’d find yourself embraced or embracing the women left behind. In this contact is the compact that all souls will meet again, each day will bring us closer. The women’s voices would now rise and clash, a fast boiling rumble to fill the vacuum. Someone would call for silence and more prayer, their admonishment cracking with their grief. You’d pick up another suparah or two. Someone would ask you to join them for the meal. They’d push you into eating, even a little. And then you’d leave, promising that aunt, that cousin, that old neighbour that you will meet again in happier times.
The call still comes after midnight or just before the dawn prayer, mostly. You know what’s on the other side of the line. You either stay in bed, recite Surah Fatiha once and Surah Ikhlaas three times or get up to pray again and prostrate. And you stay at home. There will be Whatsapp messages, someone will have started a Quraan Khatam group. You pledge a suparah or two. And you sit with it all, on your own, the grief whole and enduring. In this bewildering time, this living through a pandemic, the gendering of the rituals around death and mourning are amplified, and shaped by caution. Traditionally, women in my community do not attend the final funeral prayer before burial. Under lock-down regulations, a maximum of 50 men (whose names appear on a pre-vetted list) will be present at the cemetery. If the deceased is a first degree relative and female, a very limited number of the women closest to her could perhaps attend the ghusl, but even in this ritual washing of the dead, they are only observers from a distance. It is the gloved hands of select members of a burial committee who will rub on the stomach in circular motions, pass water over each of the limbs three times. If a woman has lost a husband, a father, a son, there could be some concession in the hearse stopping at the house on the way to the cemetery for her to see them for a brief moment in the driveway. There will be no final kiss, no contact of any kind. Everyone is masked, meters apart. There is to be no gathering at the houses in mourning. The women must seek out closure in other ways. My grandmother didn’t get to see her brother.
Food Photography 101 with Canon South Africa
I recently partnered with Canon South Africa to produce a short video with my top five tips for better food photography, and to share more of my photography practice on Instagram.
View this post on Instagram
The video is also accessible on the Canon South Africa Facebook page.
Here are the tips for your reference:
Harness and shape the light you have.
Look for an area close to a window, where the light comes in bright and evenly. You can diffuse or soften this light further with a diffuser or a sheet of thin fabric. If you find yourself shooting at times of the day or night where natural light is not available, use artificial sources of light, like your phone or a desk lamp and use something like a thin piece of white fabric or tissue paper to soften it. For best results, make sure the bulbs you’re using are marked at 5600 kelvin temperature to mimic daylight. To bounce more light into your scene, place a white board opposite your light source. To remove light, place black board in the areas where you want to deepen the shadows.
Pick the best lens for the scene you want to capture.
For wide scenes, where you want to include more of the background or for flatlays, use a wide-angle lens like a 28mm or a 35mm. If you want to photograph a scene close-up with good detail and more background blur, choose a longer macro lens like the Canon 60mm f2.8 macro for crop-sensor cameras or the 100mm f2.8. The longer lenses are also good for compressing a scene, useful if you’re using smaller backdrops and don’t want environmental distractions in your image.
Build your set in layers.
Arrange your food and props in layers to achieve a multidimensional scene that will hold the viewer’s eye. First decide what it is you want to be in focus and build your scene around that. Use crockery, cutlery, and linens to add interest. Use the ingredients that feature in your dish to add another layer to your image. Have a simple styling kit with things like tweezers to help you arrange smaller ingredients, and toothpicks to keep things in place.
Use an app.
Use the Canon Camera Connect app to wirelessly connect your camera to your phone or tablet device. Once connected, click Remote Live View Shooting on your device and you’ll be able to see at a glance if your composition is working. The app allows you to change your aperture, shutter and ISO from your device. It also works as a remote trigger, useful if you want to place yourself in the shot.
Set your focus.
Nail your focus before you attempt to capture a drip or drizzle shot. Set your focus on the tip of the food item and switch to manual focus to lock it in. Get your insta-spouse into position, set your camera to a fast shutter speed, anything above 1/125s and shoot in burst-mode just as they begin to pour or drizzle.
A bonus tip that’s not included in the video, is to always shoot in RAW format. Your file sizes will be much larger but you’ll be able to edit with greater latitude and recover highlights and shadows with less degradation than you would with a JPEG file. I use Adobe Lightroom for my post-processing but you don’t need to commit to a Creative Cloud subscription if you’re just starting out. Canon offers their Digital Photo Professional software for free and it has more than adequate functionality to process RAW files.
While most of my work to date has been shot on DSLRs, Canon’s mirrorless range is looking extremely capable and I got to shoot with, and keep, the EOS M50, a crop-sensor camera that I’d say is comparable image-quality wise to the Canon 80D Naeem now uses, but in a much more compact package. I bought a lens mount adapter so that I could use my existing EF lenses (as well as my third-party lenses) on the M50 and it works perfectly. I can say with certainty, that my DSLR will be staying at home once opportunities to travel and tour open up again.
For food photography, the M50 is a winner for me. Its form factor means I can spend a longer time shooting without feeling like I’ve just come out of arm-day at the gym. And the flip-out variable angle screen is so useful for photographing a subject overhead. Some of the manual controls are not where I’d usually find them on a DSLR but once I got used to the buttons and dials, I was able to get the results I wanted.
