Hello everyone. I am privileged to speak to you today as the editor of Drop Your Drink, a Pretoria-based music and photography blog and a music photographer. My name is Yetunde Dada, but as friends you may call me Yetu.
I’m going to tell you a bit about myself, Drop Your Drink, my photography and what it takes to do your own thing. The bit about doing your own thing is the main reason why I've called this presentation 2014: Your Space Odyssey, in reference to the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. I hope you will all be inspired to do your own thing and tackle the HAL 9000s out there.
I am half of the Dada siblings, my brother's name is Deji and I've lived in Pretoria for most of my life. I ended up studying mechanical engineering at the University of Pretoria. I spend most days stressing about my honours degree while working at the CSIR. Sometime during my 3rd year in my degree I had reached a bit of a stand-still. I didn't like my degree but couldn't see myself doing anything else. I even went as far as to check in with career guidance. The lady there told me to remember things what I loved at the time I had started my degree. There were two things that stood out for me, writing and a passion for combating climate change.
I’m going to tell you a bit about myself, Drop Your Drink, my photography and what it takes to do your own thing. The bit about doing your own thing is the main reason why I've called this presentation 2014: Your Space Odyssey, in reference to the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. I hope you will all be inspired to do your own thing and tackle the HAL 9000s out there.
I am half of the Dada siblings, my brother's name is Deji and I've lived in Pretoria for most of my life. I ended up studying mechanical engineering at the University of Pretoria. I spend most days stressing about my honours degree while working at the CSIR. Sometime during my 3rd year in my degree I had reached a bit of a stand-still. I didn't like my degree but couldn't see myself doing anything else. I even went as far as to check in with career guidance. The lady there told me to remember things what I loved at the time I had started my degree. There were two things that stood out for me, writing and a passion for combating climate change.
When you get lost in the noise of the daily grind, it is important to remember where you started from and what you really love doing. And to have someone who can point you in the right direction. That, will keep you doing your own thing.
Through my writing I started a blog called ‘Erase Nothing’ and it’s still on the internet somewhere. I wrote about nothing and everything: recipes, random bits of advice, saving the environment and my love for the growing electronic music scene in Pretoria. After about a month of this I realised that the content combination on the blog didn't make sense and this is how Drop Your Drink was born.
Drop Your Drink took the party out of Erase Nothing and made it a more serious blog in December 2011. We will be three years old and going stronger December this year.
In Drop Your Drink we found a niche. We cover the alternative music scenes in Pretoria, Johannesburg, Cape Town and New York with event and concert photography. We like art and fashion too. The team is made up of 16 writers and photographers in those cities. We have growing readership and social media following and we've got many exciting plans ahead.
You may ask how does a blog that looked like Microsoft Paint project go from looking like this to this?
It took a lot of time, discussions in a Facebook group and effort from an incredible team to make it happen. If I've learnt anything on this journey it’s that if you want to go fast you’ll go alone but if you want to go far you'll go in a team.
Trust your intuition when selecting a team to work with you on your idea because it's always right. The Drop Your Drink team, some of which are here, have a passion for doing things, dancing to the Cat Daddy, dropping drinks and living life to the fullest. This made them a perfect fit because we've made a culture out of being a family and being true to ourselves.
I will go into some of the strengths of Drop Your Drink.
We do social media really well. You know that they say that you become an expert at something when you have practised it for 10000 hours? A few members of the team have more than 10000 hours of social media time behind them. This has allowed us to create a big social media presence for such a young blog.
I want to take a bit of time out and explain what I do in photography. I started photography because of Drop Your Drink. I wanted to take better photos for the blog. I’ve had to learn the very important lesson on making it a point to educate myself in whatever I do. Learning is a life-long process and it’s good to note that mistakes can be gifts if you decide to learn from them. Some of the cool stuff I’ve done in photography is being able to shoot music festivals abroad and work with amazing organisations like Griet, A Fashion Friend, GQ, MK and Amstel Lite.
I think the biggest developments for me have been based on competitions. I was a finalist in the British Design & Art Direction Decisive Moment brief for Nokia earlier on this year and also in the NME Music Photography competition for 2014. I have simple advice about this. You have nothing to lose by entering competitions, if anything you gain from the experience of creating the content. So why not enter?
Let’s take it back to Drop Your Drink before I close. Our future projects will see us becoming more DYD Film, taking over Pretoria and saving the world. DYD Film is a strategic move and it’s something that we've been working on this year already. We want to move from a photography base to having more video content. Our most recent illustration of this was the Oppikoppi 2014 after movie that we did with MK.
We’re also moving to take over Pretoria in the sense that we want to be part of the changes that we’re seeing in the city. It’s not enough for us to just fulfil the role of documenting the change, we want to do more and involve ourselves in projects. We keep asking ourselves how we’re going to do this but I'm sure we'll figure out a way and get it right.
Saving the world from the HAL 9000s that we see and experience around us is my last point. I want you to realise that you can always do more and complain less about problems that you see around you. For me, that means that my passion for combating climate change has Drop Your Drink as an established platform. It’s a bit of a weird combination but we’re trying to make recycling and climate change as cool as watching Crystal Fighters live.
You got to hear about my journey with Drop Your Drink, some bits of my life as a photographer and where we’re heading. It is my hope that your 2014 Space Odyssey has some fuel to get going after this. I will leave you with these wise words from Farrah Gray, “Build your own dreams or someone else will hire you to build theirs.”
Drop Your Drink took the party out of Erase Nothing and made it a more serious blog in December 2011. We will be three years old and going stronger December this year.
In Drop Your Drink we found a niche. We cover the alternative music scenes in Pretoria, Johannesburg, Cape Town and New York with event and concert photography. We like art and fashion too. The team is made up of 16 writers and photographers in those cities. We have growing readership and social media following and we've got many exciting plans ahead.
You may ask how does a blog that looked like Microsoft Paint project go from looking like this to this?
It took a lot of time, discussions in a Facebook group and effort from an incredible team to make it happen. If I've learnt anything on this journey it’s that if you want to go fast you’ll go alone but if you want to go far you'll go in a team.
Trust your intuition when selecting a team to work with you on your idea because it's always right. The Drop Your Drink team, some of which are here, have a passion for doing things, dancing to the Cat Daddy, dropping drinks and living life to the fullest. This made them a perfect fit because we've made a culture out of being a family and being true to ourselves.
I will go into some of the strengths of Drop Your Drink.
We do social media really well. You know that they say that you become an expert at something when you have practised it for 10000 hours? A few members of the team have more than 10000 hours of social media time behind them. This has allowed us to create a big social media presence for such a young blog.
We like original content. This is where that whole honesty thing comes in. We don't hide the truth in our pieces but at the same time we don't go out of our way to be nasty. Our readers really appreciate this.
Some of us are really good at networking. I like to hang out in the background but when I say that I shoot for Drop Your Drink I get one of two responses: “Do you know Deji?” or “Do you know Henry?” I have never minded this because we're just playing at our strengths and it benefits the blog.
We haven't always had our ups. One specific post stands out. In 2013, Skrillex came to South Africa and performed a set of shows here. We covered his show at a waterless park in Boksburg, whose name I will not mention.
I won't reveal the extent of my dislike for that particular venue. I also won't go into detail about my experience trying organise media passes before the event because that too was a nightmare. I will say that at 12h30 on the Saturday of the concert I was left with no option but to give our fashion editor at the time my VIP ticket because I found out at the entrance that I did have media accreditation after all. Some of the highlights during the afternoon included being shouted by a bouncer because media people were apparently not allowed into the VIP section from his entrance, watching him shout at the ticketing officers who came to assist me and being barred from the photo pit for all acts. It was at this point that Lucy, my fellow team member, and I decided to focus on another aspect of that concert: the horror of the fashion at that concert.
I took photos of girls in bikinis, girls with their butts out and jocks in wife beaters. If I could have captured the essence of Snooki 101 Tanning Oil and smeared it on those photos then I would have done that too. Lucy collected notes and wrote. The post received very interesting and varied reactions. The first was what we intended, humour and lots of laughter. The second was responses from angry people featured in the post (I guess one has to be careful about people’s rights). We got the angriest comments from the person in charge of media for the venue. In our line of work relationships with concert organisers are important. We however value freedom of speech and honesty in our work. I could say that we had the last laugh in the end though. We were re-followed on all social media channels by the venue a few weeks ago. I guess some people hold grudges. I might have needed two or three tissues to stem the tears of laughter.
We haven't always had our ups. One specific post stands out. In 2013, Skrillex came to South Africa and performed a set of shows here. We covered his show at a waterless park in Boksburg, whose name I will not mention.
I won't reveal the extent of my dislike for that particular venue. I also won't go into detail about my experience trying organise media passes before the event because that too was a nightmare. I will say that at 12h30 on the Saturday of the concert I was left with no option but to give our fashion editor at the time my VIP ticket because I found out at the entrance that I did have media accreditation after all. Some of the highlights during the afternoon included being shouted by a bouncer because media people were apparently not allowed into the VIP section from his entrance, watching him shout at the ticketing officers who came to assist me and being barred from the photo pit for all acts. It was at this point that Lucy, my fellow team member, and I decided to focus on another aspect of that concert: the horror of the fashion at that concert.
I took photos of girls in bikinis, girls with their butts out and jocks in wife beaters. If I could have captured the essence of Snooki 101 Tanning Oil and smeared it on those photos then I would have done that too. Lucy collected notes and wrote. The post received very interesting and varied reactions. The first was what we intended, humour and lots of laughter. The second was responses from angry people featured in the post (I guess one has to be careful about people’s rights). We got the angriest comments from the person in charge of media for the venue. In our line of work relationships with concert organisers are important. We however value freedom of speech and honesty in our work. I could say that we had the last laugh in the end though. We were re-followed on all social media channels by the venue a few weeks ago. I guess some people hold grudges. I might have needed two or three tissues to stem the tears of laughter.
One of the biggest sacrifices for growth in any field is time and hard work. How much time and hard work are you willing to put into making your ideas come to light? I can tell you that when it’s 3am, you’re writing an exam in 5 hours and you’re busy drafting interview questions for some local act that you don’t know then you have to consider that cost. You also have to make sure that you have a solid foundation that can remind you why you started your project in the first place. I've watched many good ideas fail because of this. People just gave up and the dream dies with them. We keep persevering as a blog and it’s allowed us to keep gaining traction and become better at what we do.
I want to take a bit of time out and explain what I do in photography. I started photography because of Drop Your Drink. I wanted to take better photos for the blog. I’ve had to learn the very important lesson on making it a point to educate myself in whatever I do. Learning is a life-long process and it’s good to note that mistakes can be gifts if you decide to learn from them. Some of the cool stuff I’ve done in photography is being able to shoot music festivals abroad and work with amazing organisations like Griet, A Fashion Friend, GQ, MK and Amstel Lite.
I think the biggest developments for me have been based on competitions. I was a finalist in the British Design & Art Direction Decisive Moment brief for Nokia earlier on this year and also in the NME Music Photography competition for 2014. I have simple advice about this. You have nothing to lose by entering competitions, if anything you gain from the experience of creating the content. So why not enter?
Let’s take it back to Drop Your Drink before I close. Our future projects will see us becoming more DYD Film, taking over Pretoria and saving the world. DYD Film is a strategic move and it’s something that we've been working on this year already. We want to move from a photography base to having more video content. Our most recent illustration of this was the Oppikoppi 2014 after movie that we did with MK.
We’re also moving to take over Pretoria in the sense that we want to be part of the changes that we’re seeing in the city. It’s not enough for us to just fulfil the role of documenting the change, we want to do more and involve ourselves in projects. We keep asking ourselves how we’re going to do this but I'm sure we'll figure out a way and get it right.
Saving the world from the HAL 9000s that we see and experience around us is my last point. I want you to realise that you can always do more and complain less about problems that you see around you. For me, that means that my passion for combating climate change has Drop Your Drink as an established platform. It’s a bit of a weird combination but we’re trying to make recycling and climate change as cool as watching Crystal Fighters live.
You got to hear about my journey with Drop Your Drink, some bits of my life as a photographer and where we’re heading. It is my hope that your 2014 Space Odyssey has some fuel to get going after this. I will leave you with these wise words from Farrah Gray, “Build your own dreams or someone else will hire you to build theirs.”
Thank you for listening.
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