Image courtesy of Joe Paine

If you follow SA design Joe’s work will be familiar to you, though the face/name behind his products might not be, so allow me to introduce Joe Paine.

Image courtesy of Joe Paine

You’ll probably have seen his Kreep Planter, a modular planting system that was voted ‘Best outdoor product of 2009 voted by EDIDA’, which I first discovered in VISI.

I’ve been jonzing for one for the better part of a year, so now with the landscaping revamp underway I’ve decided to invite Joe into our home with not one but 2 in a customer configuration he whipped together for us.

Image courtesy of Joe Paine

Not wanting to stop there we ordered a Trihard stool set that is part bench, brolly holder and planter, or as we like to call it a bellyanter.

And since things always work better in three we ordered a fold feeder, which as Joe describes is

Inspired by paper origami birds, the fold feeder subtly resembles a perched Giant Eagle Owl. Bent from one sheet of special Origami steel, its construction is a bending break operator’s worst nightmare.

So there you have it, you now know Joe, Joe knows us and we are all one step closer to knowing Kevin Bacon.

You may have gathered from some of the pics of our home that I have a small but growing toy camera collection.

One of my favourites is my Holga which has been widely popularized by the Lomography kids.

The Holga is a cheap plastic camera that shoots ‘professional’ 120 film, the irony is that a roll of film, developing and printing costs more than the camera itself.

The lens is plastic, 60mm with a fixed aperture of f8 and on the newer models a whole two shutter speeds. It doesn’t get any simpler than this, ok, pin holes excluded!

As much as I love shooting film these days it is a bit of luxury and so when I found out that Holga had developed a HL-C EF mount lens for my Canon DSLR I HAD to buy one, at under R150+ I couldn’t resist. They also make them for other cameras brands.

It’s great on a full frame body as you get the characteristic heavy vignetting, though the light leaks are amiss, much of the vignetting is lost on crop sensor bodies, but the ‘dreamy’ feel remains.

Being manual the focus is all mechanical and rudimentary at best. I set the shutter speed at 1/100th of a second to emulate the hardware and cranked the ISO to compensate for the small aperture and fired off a few shots walking around Kirstenbosch with Nathan.

I love the dreamy feel of the plastic lens and it works particularly well in hard light, it’s ying to hard lights yang.

The pics above are as they came off the camera, no sharpening though I bumped up the exposure a bit as they were all a little underexposed and I’ll probably slow the shutter speed a bit next time, though still not particular blurry for a cheap plastic lens.

Overall a great little guy to have in the camera bag and while it doesn’t quite give you the perspective of shooting square format, it’s a fun novelty.

I spend so much time in other gardens these days that I rarely spend any in my own, which is looking righteously ramshackled.

I’ve just chosen to let nature run its course as wild nasturtiums pop up between cabbages and broccoli, self seeded marigolds alongside leeks and a baby squash plant creeping out of the compost heap.

Nathan discovered a monarch butterfly whose wing was damaged and as he couldn’t fly we released him onto a pack of pansies I’ve been meaning to pop into the beds.

We then picked a few pepperdews and Nathan rewarded himself with a few cocktail tomatoes right off the vine, but not before pointing out the marigolds which are in full bloom.

Dad feed the chickens while Nathan collected their spoils… it’s hard to believe that we are suburbanites with our own little backyard farm.