The falls

this week on #shoot kenya, some group of photographers decided to head to thika direction and take shots of the waterfalls and enjoy the scenery.

As usual 5:30 was the go time.we were planning to get shots of the sunrise on the new thika-nairobi highway but things did not go as planned. We instead had an intresting debate with a wells fargo security team on camera matters. After bidding them goodbye we set off to the already happened sunrise.

Thika is awesome, small city but very organised and clean compared to our capital,plus they got good pork too. We made our fist photography stop at Chania falls, did a decent to the base of the fall then made the hard climb up (enough workout for a month). On the opposite side of the fall was Thika falls, which was as spectacular as this one, the canopy on that place acted as a huge softbox so the lighting was perfect.

The scene was so perfect that i dropped my camera in the water. That was the end of the trip for it. But all was not lost, i still had my eyes. Later on in the afternoon we headed to fourteen falls which was abit far from thka. and spent time shooting till sunset.

Here are some photos i managed to get.forgot to mention, this time round i had a tripod,so panoramas were a breeze.no more handheld ones.

enjoy 🙂

Wallpaper Monday

so last week, Mutua Matheka approached me and asked i f i could do a  wallpaper for his wallpaper monday series on his blog. This was exciting news,so i went brainstroming on what to do. It was abit tricky as the brief was to do anything that i felt like (too much power) but it had to represent Kenya.

One day as I was walking home, it was reaally chilly, maybe about to snow and i noticed how everyone was warmly clad close to adding a blanket as an accessory, so i thought up an illustration based on this and the fact that our weather here in Nairobi is very unpredictable…and its always the other people who have a heads up on when to wear a sweater or not.

so this was the process.

I first sketched it on paper, the idea was to emulate a wide angle lens sort of view, as i wanted to present the idea in a different format from the norm.

I then inked it in photoshop, (a really slow process) the foreground was of thicker strokes and the bg was lighter, atmospheric perspective and still trying to add in more contrast between the foreground subject (main) and bg.also this was my chance to layout the illustration to how its going to look like in the end.

After this was filling in the flat colors and setting up a color scheme. I am a frequent user of colorlovers.com, it has awesome color palettes and harmonies so that helped alot to making this piece look different, this is also painstakingly a long process as you have to keep the colors subtle and ensure that the main character doesnt get lost in the collage of colors.

after this is defining some shades a little bit more, putting in some color adjustments for it to “pop” out and adding texture to fill and balance the negative space on the left.sign it and we are done

E.T.A 2.5 days on and off

tools : photoshop, wacom intuos 4, paper and pencil

It was a fun project and I am thankful for the opportunity. You can download the wallpapers here:http://mutuamatheka.co.ke/downloads/guest-wallpaper-monday-87-sirnare/

have a good week!

Lake Elementaita

This week, on Monday, I got a chance to go on a photography safari to lake Elementaita with the One touch photography crew. It was an amazing experience, both in terms of shots taken and the scenery itself. The journey started at 5:30am so as to arrive at Limuru from Nairobi at around 6:35am to get to see and capture the sunset from Kinare forest. It was freezing at that time..but we did not let that turn us down, shots were taken..after all, that was our main business there. Afterwards, had an interesting breakfast…then headed to the Kariandusi prehistoric site and learnt a lot about early man and pre-historic stuff. It got me into thinking what was Mr.Leakey doing when he discovered and started unearthing these artefacts, some random guy on a stroll…

Regardless, we are happy for what he unearthed, because its with this information that we were able to understand the time before our time. next stop was Kikopey.Lunch time 🙂 then headed to Elementaita and waited for the sunset…our hopes nearly vanished when it started raining which continued on for a while, but just when the sun was going down the sky cleared up and we snapped away.