Charl Durand

It’s a new dawn, believe me.

Since I opened up my eyes the first time half-a-century ago my life’s been driven by three things.

Firstly, I love discovery and exploration. That means I live in a house full of the latest consumer electronics – the driver of the majority of innovation, in my opinion – and I’ve traveled wide and far.

Secondly, I have an off-beat creative streak linked to a love for music and arts. Nothing dramatic, more subtle. That shows mostly in what I photograph, the quirky design of my garden, what Adeline calls ‘that alien music‘, and of late, my doodles and photos art on the iPad.

Thirdly, I have deep respect for, and curiosity about higher consciousness. Which is why I love long, meandering walks, and thought Uri Geller was the cat’s whiskers when I was a kid. And read people like Carlos Castenada, Erich von Daniken and Richard Bach long before I could vote. This interest led to me hosting the Johannesburg Festival of Body Mind and Spirit for a few years, back in the heyday of New Age.

I’m an informatics specialist, writer, keen traveler, passionate photographer, life enthusiast and gadgeteer living one of the older suburbs of Johannesburg, South Africa with the love of my life, Adeline, and Stoffel, the cat who’s used up most of his lives and is now blissfully spending the ninth snoozing the days away in any of several sunny spots around the house and garden.

I keep an occasional blog here.

‘It’s a new dawn, believe me’ is something Grace Slick from the Jefferson Airplane said on stage before they performed at Woodstock.

I've published five books - the story of the Sardinian mural art village Orgosolo, Windows of the World, Snow Pilgrimage, and Shoebox of Small Photos, and an album about Langebaan. I have about three I'm working on, hoping I'll release one or two a year until, well, I fall over. You can view - and buy - them all at the links above.
Want to contact me? Leave me a Facebook message!
The way we listen to music has changed dramatically since the advent of the Internet, which is why the few CDs I have left from a lifetime of collecting are wallpaper and I've switched from FM radio to Internet radio. I use iTunes as a default music organiser mainly because there are three or four iPods in the family. My favourite Internet radio stations are SomaFM and ClassicRawk, which gives you an idea of my rather eclectic taste in music. Lately an Apple TV has joined the family. I use that to stream music around the house and watch movie trailers.

I take thousands of photos a year, for work and pleasure. My first camera was a Yashica, and four or five cameras later it's now a Canon 5D. I also keep a Nikon Coolpix point-and-shoot in my bag, and finding more and more interesting uses for the (quite decent) camera on my iPhone. Most of my travel photos appear on my Flickr gallery, some favourites I show off are on Facebook, and the sport related ones are in this gallery. The Tug-of-War shoot I did as well as the Ekhaya blog at the 2011 Rugby World Cup in Wellington, New Zealand were great fun!
A large part of my time is spent traveling either for work, or simply to explore and relax.

I spent almost three months away from home in 2011, who knows what 2012 holds - here's a little preview of the year. I also write the occasional reviews and trip reports of where I've been at TripAdvisor and VirtualTourist (read about my Lesotho trip there), and have a collection of maps I've constructed of trips and general travel on my Google Maps account.
I'm a bag person. Some people age; the contents of my bag simply changes or the years. Once a year I post a photo of what I carry around to the Flickr group What's in my Bag - an interesting record and chronology of the gadgets people are carrying around.