Lee-Ann Olwage, a visual storyteller from South Africa, has won 1st place in the professional creative category at the World Photography Organisation. The winners of the various categories of the prestigious Sony World Photography Awards 2023 were announced at a special gala ceremony in London, hosted by broadcaster and art historian Kate Bryan.

In Lee-Ann’s award-winning submission, The Right to Play, she features Maasai girls from Kenya where the majority (over 80%) leave school at the age of 12 to get married. Lee-Ann seeks to reveal what’s possible when these girls are given the chance to choose a different path.

Lee-Ann, who uses photography as a mode of co-creation and celebration, says:

«What do girls dream of? And what happens when a supportive environment is created where girls are empowered and given the opportunity to learn and dream? The Right to Play creates a playful world where girls are shown in an empowered and affirming way.»

The multi award-winning photographer says that worldwide, it is estimated that around 129 million girls are out of school and only 49 percent of countries have achieved gender parity in primary education, with the gap widening at secondary school level.

« Every day, girls face barriers to education caused by poverty, cultural norms and practices such as FGM, poor infrastructure and violence, » she says, adding:

« For this project, I worked with girls from Kakenya’s Dream in Enoosaen, Kenya who have avoided FGM and child marriage, showing what the world can look like when girls are given the opportunity to continue learning in an environment that supports them and their dreams. »

Acclaimed photographer Edgar Martins from Portugal won the overall Photographer of the year title, scooping a $25,000 (USD) cash prize, and a range of Sony digital imaging equipment Additionally, Martins receives a solo presentation of his work as part of next year’s Sony World Photography Awards exhibition.

Also announced at the event were the 10 category winners, and those who placed 2nd and 3rd in the Professional competition, as well as the overall winners of the Open, Youth and Student competitions and the first-time winner of the Sustainability Prize.

To view Lee-Ann’s prize-winning photographs, the Sony World Photography Awards 2023 exhibition is at Somerset House, London until 1 May 2023, featuring over 200 prints and hundreds of additional images in digital displays from winning and shortlisted photographers.

Or view her photos on the World Photographer’s page here.

Wildlife photography is a challenging genre that requires sound technique, specialized equipment, particular knowledge, and heaps of patience, often for just a few seconds of prime opportunity for a shot. Whether you are new to the genre or a seasoned pro, this helpful video tutorial will show you six common mistakes wildlife photographers make and how to fix them or avoid them in the first place. 

Coming to you from Steve Perry, this awesome video tutorial discusses six common mistakes wildlife photographers make and how to fix or avoid them. One that many of us are often guilty of (myself included) is not checking the background. This is a common problem across many genres: events, portraits, weddings, and more. It is a natural thing: we tend to focus closely on ensuring we get the shot of the subject, particularly when it is in a narrow time window, and as such, we lose focus of what is going on in the background, often not even noticing a distraction in the frame until we look at the images on our computer later on. Getting in the habit of checking the background more often will help you create better images and avoid that aforementioned frustration. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Perry.

Karuizawa, Japan

The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, prepares to deliver a joint statement with the UK foreign secretary, James Cleverly, on the situation in Sudan, where fighting continues between rival army factions

Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AFP/Getty Images

I love vintage automobiles. And I love mystery and weirdness. Here’s how I went about light painting a vintage Model T in total darkness.

What is light painting?

Light painting is a term that is often used loosely to describe any addition of light to a night photograph. Really, though, light painting is a technique that uses a handheld light source to illuminate a scene during a long exposure. You are quite literally painting the scene with light. Night photographers have used this technique for many decades.

Here’s how I illuminated a vintage Ford Model T, an automobile built a century ago.

CRAAAAAAASH!!!!

The Model T was housed indoors. Usually, I am outdoors photographing beneath the starry skies or the moon. 

Not this evening, though. On the first evening of my night photography trip, I was talking to someone for a moment. I left my Nikon D750 and Rokinon 12mm f/2.8 fisheye lens standing on a tripod. When I returned, I couldn’t find it for a couple of seconds. 

An insanely strong and sudden gust of wind knocked it over and carried it several feet from where I had left it. The lens was smashed, with the lens hood peeling off. The lens cap was hurled 30 feet to the east. It would have gone farther had it not been for a building stopping its path.

So, photographing indoors it was with my surviving Pentax K-1 and 15-30mm f/2.8 lens.

A good way to photograph in complete darkness indoors

Of course, indoors is in almost complete darkness. Sure, I could turn on the fluorescent lights above, but where’ the fun in that? This is night photography!

However, I might want to see my way around.

I used my handy Wurkkos FC11 LED flashlight and laid it on the ground pointing away from the Model T. This would illuminate just enough for me to see where I was going, but not enough to really illuminate it.

Four steps to light painting the vintage Model T

Step one: Lighting the left side and front of the vehicle

From camera left, I held the ProtoMachines LED2 light low to the ground and swept it back and forth three times. This lit the ground to give it some texture and also lit the automobile’s front grille.

Step two: Lighting the right side and front of the vehicle

From camera right, I did the same thing on the right side. This would create a sense of symmetry as well as give it some texture and lighting.

Step three: Lighting the headlights

I screwed my homemade DIY snoot onto the ProtoMachines LED2. This would direct the light in a much smaller, more specific area. This is perfect for things such as headlights. A quick burst of red light on each of the headlights, and I was finished.

Step four: Lighting the windshield

Removing the snoot, I then held my light beneath the steering wheel. Why? Who doesn’t love a steering wheel shadow on the windshield?

After that, I closed the camera shutter. The long exposure was three seconds shy of two minutes (117 seconds at f/8 ISO 200). When you are photographing in total darkness, it doesn’t matter whether you are doing a three-second exposure or a three-minute exposure. Your light painting is doing all the illuminating. The darkness is going to be dark with any reasonable exposure when using a low ISO anyway.

You are the director

When you light paint during night photography, you are making creative decisions. You decide what to illuminate and what to keep in shadow. You decide what angle, what sort of texture, what sort of feel, and what sort of colors you want in your photo. It is the most actively creative form of photography that I know. You are wandering around in the scene, determining the angles, colors and brightness. Every “brushstroke of light” builds the photo.

If you do this, you are one of a very small amount of photographers who try. Far less stick with it. Hopefully, articles like this inspire you to keep doing it. I cannot possibly exaggerate how addicting, fun, and rewarding it is.

In times of rising antisemitism, and with the number of remaining Holocaust survivors rapidly dwindling, raising awareness about the horrors they went through remains one of humanity’s essential responsibilities.

Museums equally face the task of finding new ways to keep the public interested in learning about the difficult facts.

“Flashes of Memory: Photography During the Holocaust” is an exhibition that manages to successfully tie in the past with the present. The Instagram generation, used to seeing well-curated self-optimization photos that are perfectly staged and digitally enhanced through filters, will discover through this exhibition that photography during the Nazi era was already used as a tool to manipulate the public opinion, but also served as essential documents of atrocities for later war crimes trials. 

Exposing the camera’s ‘manipulative power’

First shown at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, “Flashes of Memory: Photography During the Holocaust” has now left Israel for the first time and is currently presented at Berlin’s Museum of Photography.

“The camera, with its manipulative power, has tremendous impact and far-reaching influence,” Vivian Uria, director of the Yad Vashem Museums Division, pointed out in 2018, when the exhibition first opened. While “photography pretends to reflect reality as it is, it is in fact an interpretation of it,” she said.

The three-part exhibition provides three different perspectives: through photographs taken by the Nazis, photos taken by Jewish photographers, and pictures taken by the soldiers of the forces that liberated Germany from the Nazis.

Children’s portraits used for antisemitic attacks

The Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, which had been stirring up anti-Jewish resentment since the 1920s, printed for example pictures of Jewish men sitting together in a pub, and accused them of plotting. It even used portraits of children to claim that Jews supposedly had base instincts.

Beginning in 1932, the viciously anti-Jewish tabloid started using the subtitle, “German Weekly for the Fight for Truth.”

During the war, the propaganda paper published photos sent in by Wehrmacht soldiers taken in the ghettos in occupied Poland, captioning them with antisemitic remarks.

Jewish photographers also took photos in the ghettos; they were commissioned by the so-called Judenräte (Jewish councils). These Jewish municipal administrations were appointed by the occupiers and were required to implement Nazi policy. Those photos aimed to document how “efficiently” the ghettos were run, while the councils were actually forced to hand over the Jewish locals for forced labor or deportation to the concentration camps. The extensive photographic documentation aimed to prove to the Nazis that Jewish labor was indispensable.

Although expressly forbidden by the Judenräte, some of the commissioned photographers used their cameras at the risk of their lives to document the suffering and horror in the ghettos.

Henryk Ross, who took photographs in the Lodz ghetto, is quoted as saying he was aware that his family members would be tortured and killed if he was caught taking pictures.

Meanwhile, the Nazis relied on antisemitic stereotypes to portray the ghettos as production facilities where “lazy Jews” were being taught to work.

The exhibition demonstrates the imbalance between the overpowering mass media Nazi propaganda industry, including elaborately staged films by Leni Riefenstahl, and the efforts of a handful of people who risked their lives trying to provide a corrective. “This is an exceptional example of human will,” said Vivian Uria.

Some of these photos avoided destruction by being buried or hidden, and would later serve as evidence in Nazi war crimes trials.

The Allies’ photos served their own purposes

Another section of the exhibition is dedicated to the photos taken by Allied soldiers. As they liberated concentration camps, they documented the horrors of the Holocaust. Through their photos of piles of corpses, or of the extremely emaciated bodies of the survivors, the planned extermination of human lives could no longer be denied.

Harrowing and disturbing, the Allies’ photos are naturally categorized as pictures taken by the “good guys.” But it should still be noted that their photographs sometimes served their own purposes: Numerous images of people behind barbed wire fences at the Auschwitz concentration camp, waiting to be freed, were staged for the cameras.

The iconic image of a Red Army soldier waving the Soviet flag on the roof of the Reichstag building on May 2, 1945, the day of Berlin’s military surrender, serves as a famous example of how post-processing can taint the documentary power of a historical photograph.

The Soviet Red Army photographer who took the shot, Yevgeny Khaldei, scratched off from the photo’s negative one of the two wristwatches the soldier was wearing, as it was a sign of looting — and the liberators were not to be suspected of looting.

The Soviet news agency later added clouds of smoke to the shot, darkening it and enlarging the flag to give the image more drama.

The show illuminates the manipulative power of images from all sides. “Flashes of Memory” is on view at the Museum of Photography through August 20, 2023.

This article was originally written in German.