Dawie's introduction

[freeflyd]

I've been a member of the Forum for a while now, but never introduced myself properly.

My name is Dawie du Plessis
I'm 33 years old and spend, as I assume most of you, every spare cent I have on my Hilux, and taking it places.

I do 3 things for money:
1: I'm a freelance photographer. Mostly stock images for agencies around the world. I also do corporate profiling and am the principal photographer for 3 quarterly career magazines. I have also spent a lot of time photographing the best hotels and resorts in Southern Africa. I DO NOT DO WEDDINGS!!!!

2: I'm a skydiving instructor. I started skydiving in Klerksdorp in 1995. I now have just under 5 000 jumps and jump weekends at Wonderboom Airport in Pretoria...

3: I do specialized stunts for films and commercials. For example: I was the guy that jumped off the cars for the Tracker commercial, one of the guys skydiving in the Virgin Mobile ad, the guy jumping of the building in the Telkom broadband ad.... And I do a lot of BASE jumping stunts for Bollywood.

Apart from that, I love playing Golf and Overlanding. I have extensively traveled South Africa, Botswana and Namibia, but am by no means done travelling those countries!

[Niel]

Dawie, this sound very nice as specially the base jumping and skydiving

[ToyX4]

Dawie

Looks like you have an adventurous life.

I always wanted to skydive or parachute or whatever, but after I did a bridge jump at Gouritz, I'm no longer interested in jumping off or out anything

Have you poste pic's of your Lux yet?

[Niel]

but after I did a bridge jump at Gouritz, I'm no longer interested in jumping off or out anything

Riaan, did gouritz as well and it was awesome, come down to CT and we will go and do Bloukrans (approx 210m I think) and we can do white water rafting on the Zambezi in low tide and again on high tide (have the high tide under the belt already but will go again). Great white shark cage diving, ok would love to do it without the cage.

Abseil from Table Mountain, Deep see diving, Kayak the Kuneni (lots of Crocks), see the desert elephants in Namibia, let change that to go and find them. Travel to all the national parks in southern Africa. Go Marion or St Helena Island ok there is more but let me stop now I am hijacking Dawie's post.

[pietpetoors]

That sounds great Dawie.

[freeflyd]

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1226

[Papa Joe]

Dawie, WELCOME !

Can I have a little of that precious thing you "appear" to have plenty of ... time !
I just cannot get to the lekker stuff. As this is the year 2000'ngreat (2008), my
priorities HAVE to change.

Your lifestlyle is an inspiration .

Enjoy !

[BenHur]

Hi Dawie

Interesting hobbies you have. I guess no one can call you bang gat As for me, well I prefer to have my feet on Terra Firma or inside my 4x4 if it has to leave the ground, and I don,t like flying in anything propeller driven I live almost next to the Wonderboom airport.

Do you know Skydive (memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=35) that is a member here too?

[freeflyd]

I'll probably know skydive. It's not a big sport in this country.

My colours are red and yellow, so take a look up tomorrow and you'll probably see me.

[iming]

Hey there,
Id be interested in hearing how you got the photography connections and what camera etc you use!
iming

[freeflyd]

Iming,

My photography connections were accidental. Every time I've tried to work at making connections, I got shot down. I find the photography market in South Africa ridiculously difficult and very underpaid. The obvious photography all of us would like to do is wildlife and nature. Guys like Nigel Dennis etc. have that market pretty sealed up. The outdoor magazines have people on staff working for them and will mostly only take your photographs if they can exploit you. I once got offered R50 for a front page image... Yeh Right!

You can search "stock image libraries" on google and see if you can supply to some of them. Getty Images is probably the best and biggest, but very difficult to get into unless you have something different to offer. I got in with them because of my Skydiving. check out http://www.gettyimages.com/Home.aspx and search anything you can think of... The Canon 5D or Nikon D200 is their minimum requirement. If you have the right equipment, and you think your images are better than what they have, then try and contact them. They have just cleaned house and dropped about a million images from their library.

I use all Canon gear. I have a 5D and 400D as backup. My lenses range from 17mm to 300mm with 1.4 x converter. They're all canon and have Image Stabilizing. To replace my current gear will cost about R135k locally.

[pietpetoors]

Thanks Dawie, I will also check out getty.
A South African company that started up a while ago is Pico, I submitted some pics and they not too full of $h1T like most of the stock photo companies. Check out their site at http://travel.picolib.com/ , you can register at
http://www.picolib.com/joomla/index.php ... om_wrapper
Please note that you can choose the categories under which you want to submit photos.
If you sign up mention in the refer field that you were referred by pietpetoors.

Then also have a look at http://photosa.co.za/forum/sell.php I added some more links there.

[MARIUS NEL]

Hallo Dawie Hel wat n geluk, Ek is ook n Hilux MAL mens Wil nog altyd die valskerm ding doen maar aai die MOED is maar min Wat kos n kursus nou al en n Tandem sprong?Groete Marius