Category: Photography

Moo MiniCard Holders (with cutting file)

Moo MiniCard holder
I’ve been getting a steady stream of hits since MOO featured my MiniCard-holders in their newsletter and Inspiration gallery.

I use their MiniCards to promote ShootCake, my food photography sideline. The MiniCards are really bitty and supercute in that way all diminutive things are. When they were going to be included in the goody-bags at an event I was photographing, I realised their lilliputian dimensions would also be their disadvantage in the mash of larger business cards, tissue paper, and samples.

A card-holder seemed like the best presentation solution and I came up with a concept that referenced my work and allowed for the card itself to be showcased.

Moo MiniCard holder

They’re easy to knock together if you have a cutting machine and the design software that talks to it. I altered a camera-shaped dingbat to fit the dimensions of the card, mirrored it to create a flip-open mechanism and inserted a vertical cut for the card to slot through.

I’ve been fielding a few queries to go commercial with these but my minions are as lazy as I am. If you have access to a Silhouette Cameo, I’ve made the cutting file available for you to download here*. The file allows for six card holders to be cut out of one standard 12×12 scrapbook paper sheet.

Moo MiniCard holder

*Creative Commons License
Camera-shaped MiniCard Holder by Saaleha Bamjee is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Down in G’town – Days 4 and 5 – Quick Pics

The course supervisors continued their readings and seminars on Thursday while Friday gave us our first lick of the peer-review/critique-circle experience.

It was not the evisceration I expected but a valuable series of inputs and comments on the way we structured and conveyed meaning through our work.

I’ve been looking for this grade of sand-paper all my life.

Here are the last in my series of photos taken in and around the Rhodes University campus:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Down in G’town – Days 2 and 3 – Quick Pics

Day 2:

We spent most of Tuesday on a farm belonging to Robert Berold, one of the course supervisors. It is a generous space and when we weren’t being embraced by the heartening hospitality of our hosts, we filled our time sitting under the trees free-writing.

We left the farm early enough for me to still have a bit of time to walk through Grahamstown and take a few close-up pictures of the Cathedral.

There’s also a metal sculpture on campus that makes me feel like an unbound traveller, cycling into the Anywhere.

Day 3:

It was our first full day of readings and seminars, and as per my twitter/facebook updates, I couldn’t help but fizz with fangirl-adulation.

In this “The City of Saints”, the most interesting buildings to photograph often happen to be religious structures. The following pictures are of the Rhodes University Chapel of St Mary and All the Angels.

Down in G’town – Day 1 – Quick Pics

Registration at Rhodes was fairly painless. My Rhodent status is now confirmed by the requisite unflattering likeness fused onto plastic.
The day’s welcomes and introductions left me a with a bit of daylight to take a short photo-walk down Somerset Road.

Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA) on St Peters Campus, Rhodes University, and home of the MA Creative Writing programme.
When the Grahamstown gaol closed in 1975, it had been the oldest functioning prison in the Republic of South Africa.


Down High Street, towards the St. Michael and St. George Cathedral.

My mother’s city

I’m in Cape Town this week, visiting my mum for the first time since she’s moved to the Mother City.

There have been more pictures than words of late, and I’d have turned this entire space into a photo blog yonks ago if it didn’t mean I would be giving my procrastination djinn the rope to strangle my muse.  But for now, while Table Mountain mellows and irons out my thinking, pictures will have to make do.

Looking towards Cape Town from Milnerton beach
Cape Town Stadium about to be hailed back to its mothership
The Turkish bulk carrier Seli 1 ran aground on Table View beach in September, 2009
Turkish bulk carrier Seli 1

Click here to read my 2006 Capsule Cape Town account.

Photowalk: Fietas and surrounds

Naeem and I spent last Saturday morning footing in Fietas with Darren Smith and Gus Silber for a photowalk through one of Johannesburg’s most interesting and textured areas.

I used to live in a commune not far from where we were shooting.

Krause street and De la Rey were part of my daily commute and even though I was taken by the decaying facades admired through anti-smash&grab car-window tinting, I just didn’t gather enough fortitude at the time to see these structures up close.

But there’s always guts in numbers.

The four of us started off at the 23rd Street mosque, walked down towards the De la Rey street subway linking Pageview to Fordsburg and ended at the in desuetude Jajbhay Memorial school.

The De la Rey street subway mural is a recent installation and tells the story of a community who were uprooted yet who also celebrated, worshiped and hoped for a time when the spectre of Apartheid would shrink away.

De la Rey street subway mural
De la Rey street subway mural
De la Rey street subway mural
23rd Street Mosque, Fietas