MPUMELELO MACU – Who Am I?

I’m a Soweto kid, grew up in Pimville. Inspired by urban culture. I started photography as an escape from my graphic design work.

I studied multimedia design and production at City Varsity. Then I started my design career at Ogilvy around 2009. Hungry and determined on changing the world.

While at Ogilvy, I fell in love with photography. I started taking photos on my travels to and from work. I used a phone at the time and I joined a website called 75.co.za and that took my love for photography to another level. You could only post one photo a day on the website and you had to make it the best photo of the day.

Learnt a lot from all the photographers on the website. I then invested in my first DSLR and took photos every day, without fail. I had a blog that I used to showcase my work and document all the things that I was doing.

In 2010, I got invited to shoot the first Street Cred event in Johannesburg and that opened so many doors for me. I met Liam Lynch who was a Red Bull photographer at the time. He told me about an position that was available at Red Bull for photographers.

He put me on and in 2011, I shot my first Red Bull event. I’ve been a Red Bull photographer since. This led to working with some cool brands like Nike, Adidas, UberEats to name a few.

Fast-forward years later, I was at Woolworths, working as a multimedia designer. But I did so much work outside the office. Shooting a lot of lookbooks for different clothing stores in Cape Town.

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I fell in love with the Fujifilm X100T. I was looking for something small that I would carry around and use for my street photography. Never got to buy that camera.

Then I won a Toyota Aygo competition which award the winner a photography gear voucher. I bought my first Fujifilm camera and never looked back. I bought the X-T10 and that changed everything. Having a light-weight system made it easy to move around and I shot all my commercial work with that camera.

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I currently shoot on a XT-2 and cactus speedlights. I do a lot of strobing and love creating portraits at events.

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I travel a lot, so the Fujifilm system has been so ideal for me.

Find me on my social channels:
http://Instagram.com/mpumelelomacu
http://twitter.com/mpumelelomacu
http://facebook.com/mpumelelomacu.co

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