 A few nights ago I was sitting watching Keith Floyd on television. For those of you who don't know who Keith Floyd was, he was a TV chef whose unbridled enthusiasm for cookery was responsible for changing the way that food programs were made on British television. But what has a cookery show from the 1980s got to do with photography? There are many similarities between talking about food and talking about photography. When I was younger, both seemed to be talked about in a very earnest and high-brow sort of way. Today I'm going to be sharing with you the work of a photographer whose own unbridled passion and love for photography seems to leap from his very images. He changed the way that I perceived my own photography. He brought the joy back into my images. Let's stop taking ourselves so earnestly serious for a moment and simply enjoy the unconventional photography of Obi-Wan Halter. How's it? When I was young and first introduced to Keith Floyd his shows encouraged me just to have fun while learning to cook. It wasn't so much about the cookery itself but the joy of the ingredients in the process. When you take that same joy for the ingredients in the process which will broadly call enthusiasm that Keith Floyd had for food and you apply it to your photography then great things start to happen in your images. As a student because I was at art school you know I was trying to be artsy and that was artsy with a capital A. Which for me I thought meant being extremely serious about my photography and the way that I behaved as a photographer. Frivolity. There was no place for frivolity in either the way I behaved or the way that I took photos. Now we could spend a whole video talking about why this earnestness filled my approach and it still sneaks in from time to time and also into my videos but that would be, well it would be pointless because it would be going back into being overly earnest again. So it's time to put to one side the strokey bed musings about all the hidden meaning and the use of masks by Ralph Eugene Meatyard and how it relates to the dual personality of the American South during the gas crisis of the 1970s and simply enjoy some photographs. And I'm going to share with you Obi's photography and hopefully like me you're going to learn to see that you can be serious about your photography but still be so laid back about it that you're practically horizontal. It's not often you remember the very first time you really discovered a photographer but I distinctly recall the moment that Obi-Walper held sir that South African force of nature properly crossed my radar. Back in the 90s every year the photography schools in South Africa got together and they spent a few days at some random location doing what photography students do which is actually mostly drinking and taking a few photographs. At one of those get-to-get there's Obi had been invited to give a talk about his photography. You know that saying about how owners tend to end up looking like their pets. In photography it's also so often the case that when you meet a photographer behind the images they seem so totally suited to the photography that they produce. Seems like an obvious thing to say but some people never produce photography that is about them. That it's that missing piece of a puzzle that when you put the photographer and the photograph together they fit so perfectly like a glove and this is often because the photographer never allows their personality to really truly shine through in a photo. Well Obi isn't like that at all. His photography isn't humorous and fun in a silly kind of jokey sort of way because he's trying to just be silly. It's fun because it's shot through with his own seemingly unending enthusiasm for life with all of its quirks and its complete weirdness and that goes for Obi himself too. Listen to him talk. I was encouraged to try and stop taking myself so deadly serious. Sure you know I would treat the actual process of creating a photograph with with respect but outside of that I should just chill man and just simply have fun buggering around taking photographs and seeing what happens. When you visit Obi-alba house's website and I've linked to it in the description below and I would certainly suggest that you do go and have a look at his stuff and his writing because they're great. The word enthusiasm comes up a lot. Enthusiasm isn't a word that often comes up when talking about photography. People tend to talk about passion. Passion isn't really the same thing. Passion as far as I'm concerned is the power that moves you towards a certain goal to follow your dreams. Enthusiasm is the secret source that keeps you going once you've reached the mythical summit of following your passions. So enthusiasm is a crucial element for any photographer because if you're not enthusiastic about the things that you're doing the things that you're photographing then your image is going to lack soul and it was this that drew me to Obi's photography. His unbridled enthusiasm not just for the people and the places he's photographing but for the very act of creating photographs. It's there in the way that he finds joy in the most random things and it's there in the playful way that he dances with that mistress of light. Because of this I come back to his books again and again. They are fun and they remind me that despite sitting here on a wet and grey so-called British summer's day that out there somewhere in the craziness of Africa there is a young lad standing in front of a waterfall taking his goat for a walk looking just proud as punch. Unconventional is a word you can use to try and sum up South Africa. I don't know how successful you would be but it's certainly a word that you can apply to Obi's photography. At the start of his first book Aries Fontaine to Zia Fontaine there are two photographs and if I were asked to sum up Obi's photography in the way that they move me these would be the two that I would choose. First of all you have these little kids hiding behind this road sign. Everything about this this photograph is is wrong technically speaking you know according to the book but life doesn't happen according to some set of rules and if Obi had taken the time to fiddle and fuss to get an uncluttered background and construct a perfect you know whatever perfect means composition and you know light it properly and yadda yadda yadda then the inquisitiveness of the kids who are both at once shy and fascinated would be lost and of course that's the very heart of this photograph that's what makes it work. Of course know the rules understand the rules and that there's a time and a place for them just don't slavishly follow them to the exclusion of everything else. The other photograph I would choose is this proud pharma type character who in africans one will call an oaky he's standing there next to his Rolls Royce. Obi often captures his images with little snippets of stories about the scene in that regard he's a little bit like Dwayne Michaels but he is the opposite almost the anti-Dwayne Michaels as Obi's stories are fun and they help us to get a taste for the enjoyment that he felt in that moment not by giving away the joke or poking fun at the people but by saying like almost in his own words hey man you know this guy here in the middle of nowhere not only is he got a Rolls Royce but he's also got a Ferrari and two Mercs you know this guy was like a fountain of life and I wish you could have met him as he drank his cane and coke whilst smoking Texan plain and you know the very best thing about it man this oak has a license plate on his Rolls that says oak how cool is that you see it's that enthusiasm game coming up a desire to share not just the photograph but the moments that came before and after it makes the photographs feel so much more personal like Obi is sharing this trip with us and he's inviting us to come along for the ride some photography which is created in a similar vein where you load up a camera you just go and see where the road goes can feel a little bit like a Victorian explorer you know who goes off to the deep dark wilderness documents and photographs some strange land and then brings images back to be discussed at a series of lectures I you know I like the photography of Roger Ballin you know who's who's photographed some of the same small dorks dork being a small rural town in africans but when you compare his photographs with Obi's photograph you can see the difference between the two quite clearly Ballin is an American you know and for whom this isn't all really in his blood but Obi is a born and bred African the dust and the heat and the land that are in him they're in his photographs and they're all the better for it now that's not to say that one can only exclusively photograph the places that one comes from because that that would be of course ridiculous and Obi has shown that his enthusiasm for places that go beyond Africa is just as much part of his images so when you boil it down it's about enthusiasm not just observation when was the first time you really fell in love with photography for me it was those moments when I really started to develop my own negatives you know in the dark you would load them up and then you would unroll the dripping film from their spirals and and hold it over to the light you just see the results of my efforts they captured on film this it was like magic then and it's still like magic now when I get a chance to develop my own film as a student we'd been introduced to photograms and painting with light exercises to help us understand how light interacts with paper and film now because because I was a know-it-all student and I was young and idiotic I completely missed the point but Obi didn't and the point is that you can play with light that is not just something that a photographer has to battle or control or bend to their will but it's a tool that you can have fun with to paint on a vast scale you can experiment with it you can use it to create never to be repeated images that own a lot of their beauty to random chance that spirit of experimentation and randomness is what I feel is lacking a little bit for my own photography these days the the opportunity to be amazed as I grew older instead of becoming more confident in experimenting I became almost the opposite overly concerned with being correct and my photography did suffer for it for a time as mentioned earlier I will link to a video at the end of this that will show you how I rediscovered the joy in my own photography there's a kind of Bob Ross happy little accident vibe in a lot of Obi's photography that he's creating at the time this photo of a family is a fantastic example he's doing one of those long exposures you know when you open the shutter in the dark and then you use multiple flashes with a hand flash to paint in the various parts of the photo you can almost hear him asking the family you know stay still I'm going to trip the shutter and then he begins the process then you know possibly a couple of weeks later when the film is developed ah no man look the little kid has been turning his head to look at Obi as he moves around firing his flash gun the whole thing's ruined now that's what I probably would have said to myself but to Obi that mistake seems to be one of those happy little accidents you know those coincidences that fuel his enthusiasm for experiencing photographing and sharing with us his own unique world click on this video here to be reminded about why you picked up a camera in the first place and to rediscover the joy in your own photographs