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One of my favorite hobbies is photographing toys. This is what I mostly feature here. My Toy Stories.

A Story In Every Picture

I have a bit of a problem when it comes to plastic dinosaurs and toy cars. I love them and I just want to shoot them. So I try to create stories in the photos that I take and bring them to life in some way. Either to show off their battered beauty or create a bit of magic in a situation or a story that unfolds.

Travelzilla is a plastic godzilla who loves to travel. He one of my favorite toys and he has been everywhere with me for as long as I’ve had him. I’ve a lot of fun taking photos of him and almost every shot has let to an interesting human encounter as either children or adults become entranced with the story I am setting up. He is quite charming that way.

When I was a kid I was convinced – as so many of us were – that my toys came alive at night. I spent quite a lot of time on winter nights tucking them all up in crochet blankets that either I or my mother made. Each favorite toy with its own blanket. I never really liked dolls. I liked cars and ponies. I built my toys houses out of sticks, took them down to the river at the farm and made dams for them, made them sail in rafts across the pool, and never got bored. I never grew out of this. That’s why Toy Stories exists.

Once I ran a project for charity called Dinosaur Hunt. I hid plastic dinosaurs all over the city (I did this in Joburg and Cape Town), took photos of them, and posted them on Facebook with hints on where to find them. Whomever found them would have to take a photo, repost it to Facebook, and I would donate R100 to the charity of their choice. I raised R3000 which went to various charities. That was a lot of fun.