Bio

BACKGROUND

I was born 1956 in South Africa to the odd couple, Geurt (Senior) and Corrie Bloem. My farther is from a Dutch origin and emigrated to South Africa just after the 2nd World War. My mom is a local girl from a large conservative family, that resided in the small one–horse town called Makwassie in the old Western-Transvaal. My primary schooling and first part of my high school years was done in Randburg, close to Johannesburg and after the family moved to the farm in 1971, I completed high school in Warmbaths in 1974.

I studied for a degree in agricultural engineering at the University of Pretoria. After graduation I started with an engineer-in-training position in one of the government departments. After a year I joined the consulting engineering company MBB Consulting Engineers in 1983. Since leaving MBB in 2006, I have started up my own consulting company, Kariwa Project Engineers.

I am happily married to my wife Elizabeth (Lize) and have three daughters, the twins age 19 and the little one, age 14. Lize and the daughters are my biggest critics and I use them as my sound boards whenever I require inputs on photographs. They all have a better understanding than what I have of compositional balance within a photograph.

PHOTOGRAPHY

My main interest in photography is towards photographing nature . I truly love nature and spend nearly all of my free time either in nature or reading up on nature related subjects.

MY CURRENT EQUIPMENT

Over the years, I have invested in various consumer type lenses but these lenses always frustrated me as I could not get pin sharp slides. What I soon realised was that I will only be able to address this burning issue, by investing in better manufactured lenses.

Of late, I have decided to replace all my lenses with Canon L type lenses and have in my bag the following equipment:

Canon EOS 1D MIIN and two 20D's

4x1Gbyte and 2x2Gbyte CF cards

Canon 600 f4 IS

Canon 400 f5.6

Canon 70-200 f2.8 IS

Canon 17-40 f4

Canon 100 f2.8 macro

Canon 85 f1.8

Canon speedlight 550 with Better Beamer

Manfrotto tripod with Kirk ball head and a Wimberley gimbal head on a Gitzo 1410 tripod.

PD70X portable storage device

ROLE MODEL PHOTOGRAPHERS

The photographers that are role models to me are:

John Shaw for his exceptional attentions to detail and the simplicity of his images;

Arthur Morris for his ability to depict birds as art;

Art Wolf for his fantastic eye for compositions;

Nigel Dennis portraying the Kalahari in different light;

Koos van der Lende for his compositions in wide angled photography of Southern Africa’s nature and his ability to "paint" with light.

The local and international photographers whose work I really enjoy to view and to study, are:

EJ Peiker, Greg Downing, Charles Glatzer, KK Hui whose work can all be seen on the international web forum called NatureScapes.net and obviously their individual web pages.

Jill Sneezeby, Wikus Leeuwner, Darrel Balfour, Richard du Toit, Nicole Palmer, Heinrich van den Berg, Chris van Rooyen and Albert Froneman who are all some of our best local photographers.