GERHARD LAUBSCHER

I have watched the evolution of Gerhard's fly fishing and parallel with that his almost complete mastery of fly fishing photography. Looking back at the times we fished together in earlier years I remember him carrying a Minolta film camera and always squeezing the most out of it. Even then he was taking pretty good shots, but as his career unfolded into the business of guiding and saltwater fly fishing, he became more serious about cameras. On one of their trips to the Seychelles I suspect Henry Gilbey (http://www.henry-gilbey.com/ ) influenced Gerhard a lot, but it’s a guess because Gerhard has always had a keen eye for composition and a deep appreciation for the value cameras have to compliment fly fishing. And as his guiding business, FlyCastaway, expanded and reached some really exotic destinations ( http://www.flycastaway.com/) Gerhard got into more and more fish species and more and more camera gear. Now he uses a Canon 7D along with a 5D Mk II, 16-35 mm and 24-300 mm Canon lenses (among others) and is undoubtedly now one of the best fly fishing photographers in South Africa. I am tempted to say he is the best and leave it that, but subjectivity is always open to debate, I know.

In the following series of images (and I will post more in the weeks to come) keep an eye on Gerhard’s sense of composition and colour.

Then along with the images Gerhard sent this note, which will interest those of you who do some photography, but you can skip it if you don’t...

Here is some of my work shot over the last 3 months at various destinations in the Indian Ocean, Rhodes and Sterkfontein. Please feel free to crit, you know I value your opinion and would like to have your input. Very little if anything has been done to the images, the RAW’s went into Lightroom where the Vibrance is adjusted by about 15points and the blacks by about 5, they are processed out of Lightroom as 1500 pixel wide jpegs of no bigger than 600k.

(Lightroom is a leading brand of image adjusting software much favoured by many professional photographers - http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshoplightroom/)