London, Mind The Gap!

I was lucky enough to spend the sunniest weekend ever in London last month... I rolled up my sleeves, put them flip flops and vintage shades and went around to do what I love the most, shooting places and having loads of ice cream. The result:

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God's Palette!

These were taken 12000 feet above the portuguese coast, on the way back to Dakar, from Paris and London. It was around 6.45, and I just hope you feel as enchanted and humble as I felt, as I was witnessing this....

These colors and divine shades, I named them God's Palette, and I don't want to risk an explanation, I just felt it was appropriate...

Bamako : a shy weeknight in the hot season

After a veeery long day in a market visit, 45 degrees Celcius, dust and liters of sour green tea, a colleague of mine had the crual but cute idea to invite me for dinner at a bar that seems to be a must-go in Bamako... Now what's a man to do?

A little detail somehow made my night, and I was glad I took Lucius (my Camera) with me...

I don't know who did the lighting of this bar-restaurant, but I found it veeery interesting and worth showing. The dozens of UFO-shaped lamps are made of plates and saucers put together front to front, with an electric bulb beneath... I promised myself to steal the idea for my future kitchen!

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Accra: as slow as the light...

It was a cool African night at the lobby of a Hotel in Accra... I had just had a lonesome dinner and a Ghanaian reinvention of Etta James at the early stages of her career was yelling on a piano, begging for attention.

I was busy trying to understand and maybe practice the complicated language of serious photographers, reading in my new bible (my Nikon D5000 user manual), when something made me look up to the roof; I saw the fan, grabbed Lucius (my camera) and shot these pics at various shutter speeds and aperture settings (you don't need to know what it means, it's just me bragging on my growing skills...hehe)

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Dakar: African Renaissance

Dakar recently inaugurated it's latest monument, the African Renaissance Monument, right opposite the lighthouse of Mammelles. The erection of such a huge and costly statute crated a political turmoil, as many criticized the appropriateness of such a "jewel" in the current context...

That didn't stop the photographers from rushing to it, and spend hours photographing every single inch of this impressive family...

I focused on the lighting of the statute, which I found stunning, and spent ages trying to get the settings right on my camera, and this is what I came back with...

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Dakar: Full moon in the Harmattan season

The Harmattan is a wind that comes from the desert towards West Africa, and is knowned for being very hot, dusty and dry, during the day and very cold at night. What I like about it is the dark shades of red to purple that it gives to the sky... this is what it looks like

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Dakar: Sunday sunset on the hill, at the lighthouse

Woah, the air is so pure, the wind is singing in my ears and I'm literally feeling every dying sun ray on my skin, as my buddy Jan and I are climbing the hill with our Nikon cameras and our tripod and, of course, our user manuals, willing to take thousands of photos...

Moments like this, in Dakar, my hometown, are filled with that kind of unbelievable "nothingness" and even time seems to wait...

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