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While ripping out yellow blooms blanketing hillsides in Los Angeles, Max Kingery has been questioned about his fervor for killing flowers.
But the clothing designer who used the plants to dye his spring and summer lines said he takes no offense at being accused of pillaging this part of California’s “superbloom.” Instead, he sees it as an opportunity to raise awareness about a destructive flower that proliferated in the state following an unusually wet winter: wild black mustard.
Mustard was among the most prominent of wild flowering plants that seemingly popped up everywhere in California this spring. As temperatures warm it is starting to die, making it tinder for wildfires in a state that has been ravaged by blazes. Its stalks can act as fire ladders, causing flames to climb.
Mustard also smothers native plants, transforming the landscape. Its leaves and roots inhibit the growth of other species, creating a mono-thicket that spreads rapidly. There are numerous kinds of wild mustards in California, but black mustard or Brassica nigra is considered among the most pervasive.
Kingery is part of a growing group of artists, designers and chefs who are tackling the invasion by harvesting the plant to use in everything from dyes to pesto.
Foragers have led edible hikes to pick its peppery flower and munch on its leaves. There have been workshops and instruction guides on how to turn it into paper, fertilizer and a spicy version of the well-known condiment by the same name.
Kingery’s line, aptly named “Pervasive Bloom,” features sweatshirts, pants, tank tops and other items dyed naturally using mustard. On the website for his company, Olderbrother, a model embraces the uprooted weed while donning a mustard-dyed jacket. Other photos show the clearing of the land.
The Olderbrother store in Los Angeles is decorated with a huge panel of the plant’s stalks, leaves and flowers that were woven on a loom by designer Cecilia Bordarampe. The material came from the first harvest when Kingery said his team initially harvested about 450 pounds to make the dye. They have continued, removing more than a 100 pounds a week ever since, mostly from public land in Los Angeles.
Even that amount is only nipping at the problem, Kingery said.
The plant from Eurasia was first brought to California in the 1700s — it has been found in the adobe bricks of missions. But its presence exploded this year after a record amount of rainfall from December to April. Years of wildfires also created more spaces for the plant that thrives in disturbed lands.
State and local agencies remove mustard from managed lands, but it’s spread to places beyond.
At its peak bloom this spring, undulating swaths of yellow lined freeways. Hillsides jutting up from urban landscapes glowed. Sidewalk cracks were abloom.
“Physically, it’s been demanding,” Kingery said. “And yes, there seems in sheer volume, if you zoom out a bit, that there could be enough wild mustard here to make salads and dyed sweatshirts for everyone in the United States.”
But when Kingery sees native plants sprouting in plots that have been cleared, it makes it all worth it, he said. And, he added, to get the hues that he wants requires a lot of mustard, which in this context is a good thing.
“We don’t want to rip a bunch of plants out of the ground for no reason,” Kingery said. “The idea of something being utilized that is growing out of the sidewalk is a pretty cool concept.”
Artist Erin Berkowitz of Berbo Studio makes dyes from invasive species, including the dye for Kingery’s clothing line. She has offered classes along with a chef who crafts pesto from the mustard greens and mashes the flowers into dressing.
“This is an abundant art supply that is all around us,” Berkowitz said.
She said her work with Kingery showed the possibilities of what can happen if more people become aware of its uses.
“Visually we watched a whole hill of a park be denuded of mustard, which was a very hopeful thing,” she said.
Underneath the towering stalks of mustard, which can grow more more than 8 feet tall, blue lupine, poppies and other native plants were fighting to reach sunlight. “One public space, one whole neighborhood, returned to having healthy, functional native ecology,” Berkowitz said after the harvest in the working-class neighborhood of El Sereno in east L.A.
Jen Toy of Test Plot, an organization that partnered with Kingery and Berkowitz and helps people restore biodiversity to their neighborhoods, said “it’s really about broadening what we mean by land care, and getting other folks who might not see themselves as like environmentalists interested.”
To that end, ecological horticulturist Alyssa Kahn and artist Nadine Allan made a zine, a digital magazine, about the uses of black mustard, including to make paper, a face mask and even a kind of natural pesticide to till into garden soil.
Kahn said she was motivated to act in part because she has friends who lost nearly everything to wildfires.
“We wanted to incentivize people to do something about it,” she said, and educate them.
“They just look so pretty,” Kahn added. “They have those yellow flowers, and if you don’t really know kind of what’s happening on a larger scale, you might say, oh they’re just a sea of yellow flowers.”
Jutta Burger of the California Invasive Plant Council applauds the ingenuity and suggests people contact land management agencies to gather left-behind seeds when areas are cleared.
“You’ll never completely get rid of it, at least where it’s been established for a long time,” she said.
Still, Burger said similar efforts to creatively use something have made an impact. For example, she said, when chefs started crafting recipes involving the predatory lionfish and serving it in restaurants, its population decreased in areas, and it became widely known that the species was a threat to native marine life.
“One thing we would like to make sure people know is those yellow fields out there, they were once fields of not just yellow — they were fields of yellow, purple, pink, and blue,” Burger said.
No doubt, photography is not a cheap hobby, and the camera gear hype machine is designed to make you continually reach for your credit card to buy the latest and greatest gadget, camera, or lens. Whether you are a new photographer or a seasoned veteran, though, it is important to remember that a compelling image is not made by a great camera, it is made by a great photographer, as this insightful video essay demonstrates.
Coming to you from Adam Gibbs, this excellent video essay discovers the importance of good technique and creative vision over expensive camera gear. No doubt, the latest and greatest cameras and lenses can be a ton of fun, and there is certainly nothing wrong with enjoying them. Where things go awry, though, is when photographers start thinking that they can buy their way to better photos. No doubt, there are situations in which a better camera or lens might enable you to get shots that would not be possible otherwise or make your life a bit easier, but without solid technique and creative vision behind that, it won’t matter. A good photographer can make great images with almost any equipment, but an unpracticed photographer will struggle no matter what gear they have. Check out the video for the full rundown from Gibbs.
People are arrested every day and it’s not always ugly people getting thrown in the slammer, pretty people get up to no good as well.
A fun game to play with some of their mugshots is trying to guess whether or not the person arrested is attractive or ugly based on a few of their arrest stats.
Below is a collection of some our most challenging mugshots. Can you guess if the person in the mugshot is Hot or Not?
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The cruise ship with about 1,000 passengers anchored off Nome, too big to squeeze into into the tundra city’s tiny port. Its well-heeled tourists had to shimmy into small boats for another ride to shore.
It was 2016, and at the time, the cruise ship Serenity was the largest vessel ever to sail through the Northwest Passage.
But as the Arctic sea ice relents under the pressures of global warming and opens shipping lanes across the top of the world, more tourists are venturing to Nome — a northwest Alaska destination known better for the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race and its 1898 gold rush than luxury travel.
The problem remains: There’s no place to park the big boats. While smaller cruise ships are able to dock, officials say that of the dozen arriving this year, half will anchor offshore.
That’s expected to change as a $600 million-plus expansion makes Nome, population 3,500, the nation’s first deep-water Arctic port. The expansion, expected to be operational by the end of the decade, will accommodate not just larger cruise ships of up to 4,000 passengers, but cargo ships to deliver additional goods for the 60 Alaska Native villages in the region, and military vessels to counter the presence of Russian and Chinese ships in the Arctic.
It’s a prospect that excites business owners and officials in Nome, but concerns others who worry about the impact of additional tourists and vessel traffic on the environment and animals Alaska Natives depend on for subsistence.
The expansion will “support our local economy and the local artists here, the Indigenous artists having access to the visitors and teaching and sharing our culture and our language and how we how we make our beautiful art,” said Alice Bioff, an Inupiaq resident of Nome.
Bioff was a tour guide who greeted the Serenity’s passengers when they arrived in 2016. One of the guests admired her cloth kuspuk, a traditional Alaska Native garment similar to a smock, and wanted to know if it was water resistant.
It wasn’t, but the interaction inspired Bioff to create her own line of waterproof jackets styled like kuspuks. She now sells to tourists and locals alike from her own Naataq Gear gift store, a retail spot in the post office building, where about 20 Alaska Native artists offer ivory carvings, beadwork or paintings through consignment.
Studies show that cruise ship passengers typically spend about $100 per day in Nome, city manager Glenn Steckman said.
With the expansion, he’s hoping guests on larger cruise ships will extend their stays to experience more of Nome and the tundra, to view wild musk ox, or to sip a drink at the 123-year-old Board of Trade Saloon.
Climate change is making this all possible.
Nome, founded after gold was discovered in 1898, has seen six of its 10 warmest winters on record just in this century. The Bering Strait shipping lanes have gotten only busier since 2009, going from 262 transits that year to 509 in 2022.
“We’re going to be the first deep-draft Arctic port but probably not going to be the last,” Nome Mayor John Handeland said.
The Bering Sea ice on average reaches Nome in late November or December, about two or three weeks later than it did 50 years ago, said Rick Thoman, a climate specialist at the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
In 2019, mushers in the Iditarod, who normally drive their dog teams on the Bering Sea ice to the finish line in Nome, were forced onto the beach because of open water. The ice season will only get shorter, Thoman said.
The existing port causeway was completed in the mid-1980s. The expansion will be completed in three phases and effectively double its size. The first part of the project is funded by $250 million in federal infrastructure money with another $175 million from the Alaska Legislature. Field work is expected to begin next year.
Currently three ships can dock at once; the expanded dock will accommodate seven to 10.
Workers will dredge a new basin 40 feet (12.2 meters) deep, allowing large cruises ships, cargo vessels, and every U.S. military ship except aircraft carriers to dock, Port Director Joy Baker said.
U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, an Alaska Republican, said the expanded port will become the centerpiece of U.S. strategic infrastructure in the Arctic. The military is building up resources in Alaska, placing fighter jets at bases in Anchorage and Fairbanks, establishing a new Army airborne division in Alaska, training soldiers for future cold-weather conflicts and has missile defense capabilities.
“The way you have a presence in the Arctic is to be able to have military assets and the infrastructure that supports those assets,” Sullivan said.
The northern seas near Alaska are getting more crowded. A U.S. Coast Guard patrol board encountered seven Chinese and Russian naval vessels cooperating in an exercise last year about 86 miles (138 kilometers) north of Alaska’s Kiska Island.
Coast guard vessels in 2021 also encountered Chinese ships 50 miles (80 km) off Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg last yea r warned that Russia and China have pledged to cooperate in the Arctic, “a deepening strategic partnership that challenges our values and interests.”
Still, the prospect of Nome welcoming more tourists and a greater military presence bothers some residents. Austin Ahmasuk, an Inupiaq native, said the port’s original construction displaced an area traditionally used for subsistence hunting or fishing, and the expansion won’t help.
“The Port of Nome is development purely for the sake of development,” Ahmasuk said.
Two people hunched over a black and white checkered board, deliberating what moves they will make, how their opponent might counter and how they might counter that counter, with barely a flicker of emotion passing over their faces.
At first glance, it’s a sport that doesn’t seem the most vibrant or colorful or particularly dynamic, which makes the art of capturing its drama and excitement more complex than most sports photography.
Maria Emelianova is a leading chess photographer, tasked with traveling the world to document the highs and lows of the sport.
With over 10 years of experience, Emelianova has become proficient at capturing the slightest flicker of emotion or tension etched in the faces of the sport’s stars.
But even after years of experience, she finds it hard to put into words what makes it such a difficult profession to capture.
“That’s always a very difficult question,” Emelianova told CNN Sport when asked how she would describe the art of chess photography.
“It’s opening the very outliers in sports to a more general public through the eye of the camera. So like people who know very little of chess and of the personalities can kind of get very close to the game and feel like they are right next to this chess game.
“But I think if I knew the answer to this completely, I would probably have solved (it).”
Growing up in Russia, Emelianova began playing when she was a six-year-old, facing off against her grandfather until she joined a club to practice against her peers.
She earned her woman FIDE master status – awarded to players with an classical rating of at least 2,100 and is the third-highest ranking exclusive to women – in 2010.
She went on to become a professional chess player before taking a break from competitive chess. She did, however, make a brief return at the British Online Championship in December, 2020.
Emelianova switched her allegiances to the English chess federation in February, 2020, citing the affinity built with the organization during years of competitions in the UK and friends she made on the team as reasons for the change. She is also a staunch critic of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Her Elo rating peaked at 2,144 in 2004. The Elo rating system measures the strength of a chess player relative to their opponents. For context, Carlsen holds the record for the highest Elo rating ever achieved by a human player when he reached 2,882 in 2014.
Emelianova remembers her mother having a passing interest in photography.
“My mother was doing some photography stuff when she was younger in university, but it was analog photography,” Emelianova explained. “But I was quite fascinated with analog photos.”
Analog photography is the process of using cameras loaded with film and processing the photos in a laboratory afterwards using chemicals.
Emelianova continued: “I would find slides which she had stored from her student trips, and I would really like to go through them because all this stuff, of course, there was no Pinterest or Flickr or anything at the time.”
Emelianova’s life changed ahead of the 39th Chess Olympiad in 2010, which was held in Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia.
She had been planning to go as a fan and to catch up with friends. At the time, she had been working as a journalist and translator for a magazine in Moscow, for which she occasionally was tasked with taking photos.
A few days before the Chess Olympiad, she was asked at a press conference if she wanted to take some photos at the tournament. Despite having limited experience and equipment, Emelianova accepted.
Emelianova said she had already booked a train ticket but was whisked to the event in a private plane. Then her friend allowed her to borrow his expensive camera equipment.
“At that time, at that moment, I was like: ‘Well, this cannot be a coincidence. There is something kind of like destiny to it, to have this happen,’” she said.
“So I took a lot of photos. I had no idea what I was doing, but I published them online, just on Instagram … And magazines were reaching out, asking for photos, and I sold enough to get my own camera.”
And from there, Emelianova has made it her aim to attend every major chess tournament as a photographer.
There’s more to chess photography than just setting up position and snapping. When she began, Emelianova explained, using cheaper equipment meant the shutter sound was louder when a photo was taken, possibly disturbing players.
“I was always trying to make sure that the moment in the game is either not as critical and I can take a photo where the player can hear me but won’t be too distracted, or I will do it when it’s a really important moment and very tense moment, but I would just try to time it with the move being made,” she said.
“So they are already making the move or I know that the position on the board is already simplified and, of course, playing chess myself helped to see those moments and see that this moment … the emotions are still there.”
Once she could afford better, quieter equipment, Emelianova got closer to the action.
With the access she gets at matches – she admits she’s had to battle organizers to trust her to not intrude on ongoing games – and her knowledge and relationship with players, she knows where and when to take her shots.
“The most important, I think, is that the players trust me to not overstep the boundary. And I also, myself, I sometimes have to even fight with myself like one part is a journalist and another is a chess player,” she said.
“And the journalist is like: ‘You need to come closer and get this moment’ and the player’s like: ‘No, no, you cannot do that.’ Sometimes, being a chess player also stops me from getting a better moment.”
When she approaches a game, Emelianova says she has a number of different cues she is looking for to get the best snaps.
She says that her experience as a former professional player allows her to identify from the flow of the game, or seeing the current setting, whether or not she needs to have her camera at the ready.
Outside of the game setting, Emelianova says she is constantly studying the players’ body language.
“Some of the players don’t really show anything. But I already know enough to even, like – to catch a really, really subtle head shake or sitting like too straight or pretending to be very relaxed,” she said.
“I think my favorite part is portraits, but portraits with emotions. They have to be in some moment, not just taken out of the context. But I think, mostly, it’s the reactions of the players, the emotions and the moments which define the decider of the tournament or the game or the match.”
Her personal knowledge of the players also helps her prepare. “Alongside with knowing the players as personalities and kind of knowing what to expect from each one of them depending on the situation, I can quite often be there before something even happens,” Emelianova said.
But even with all that prior knowledge and planning, luck plays a big part in her photography, she admits.
Despite knowing what she’s looking for, it doesn’t make the job any easier. She specifically remembers the skills she learned on a photojournalism course at Moscow State University, which helped her fine tune her craft.
She also says that her work now as a chess streamer has given her a great appreciation for chess photography, as it’s allowed her to approach and talk about her work in an open forum.
“The fact that it’s difficult to find something that stands out is a challenge enough to search for it and, when you find it, it’s like really redeeming and almost impossible to repeat,” Emelianova said, adding that her job “ignites a sparkle” in her.
“Of course, sometimes I also struggle to find something that makes me go: ‘Wow,’ after so many years. But I will still keep looking because, when I do find [it], especially when it’s a player who barely shows anything, they’re completely emotionless, that’s important.
“I think when you can make a story (is important). So like when somebody (who is) not from chess can look at the photos, not necessarily on text, but on the photos and read the story from there, that’s the most important thing.”
CBC Ottawa’s Creator Network is a place where young digital storytellers from diverse backgrounds can produce original video content to air on CBC and tell stories through their own lens.
Get in touch to pitch your idea, or check out our other Creator Network stories at cbc.ca/creatornetworkott.
When Faisa Omer switches on the bright lights and turns her camera on her subject, she knows the power of her lens to highlight the good, the bad and the stories of those who step into her spotlight.
The 31-year-old photographer and mental health counsellor says she was blown away by the response to her first major photography project, which shed light on the racism her brother and his friends had experienced growing up Black in Ottawa community housing.
That led to gallery exposure and Omer’s photos being put on display in the mayor’s office, as well as her decision to expand the project across other communities across Ottawa, which she and videographer Hersi Osman documented for CBC Ottawa’s Creator Network.
Only this time, Omer decided to focus not just on the challenges and difficulties faced by Black youth, but also what makes them proud.
“Sometimes the trauma we go through kind of becomes who we are.… That’s what [people] see, what they remember,” explained Omer.
Telling that complicated story through images has become the photographer’s goal.
“We’re more than just these negative experiences that occur to us. We also have joy, we’re complex, just like other people, right? I wanted to showcase that and their hopes and dreams instead of just the negative side of the spectrum.”
Omer’s first project started in the summer of 2020, when she asked her brother Abdullah, then 17, and his friends to pose in her family’s Ritchie Street basement.
She posted the photos to Instagram alongside the first-person stories they’d shared of their experiences being Black and growing up in a neighbourhood that’s often in the headlines for the wrong reasons. It touched a nerve.
“One of the main sentiments that I felt from the community was how these stories were important. These photos had the power to change minds and attitudes towards Black people,” she said, adding she couldn’t keep up with the outpouring of messages of support.
For her, it seemed natural to keep going.
After garnering a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, she decided to take the idea to three more neighbourhoods — Lowertown, Michele Heights and Overbrook, basing her operations in each area’s community house, hoping that would help young people feel comfortable and safe to share.
On camera, participants opened up on everything from what it’s like to have your photo taken, to how to respond when you’re repeatedly asked, “Where are you from?”
Shaunette Simon opted to share a message for the next generation.
“My hope is that my grandkids will be able to come into this world and be able to be kids … and not fear that they’re going to prejudged and things are going to be denied to them because of the colour of their skin, something that they can’t change.”
Omer says she was surprised and saddened by the difficult stories she heard, including one woman’s experience of suffering a brutal beating at 16 during her first year in Canada, which resulted in her losing a year of school, and what it felt like to learn later on that the case had been dropped.
Osman also said he was surprised by the depth of pain their subjects shared.
“They were telling personal stories about their first encounter with police,” he said. “They got pretty deep in terms of their responses of what it means to be Black.”
He said he expected the 12-year-olds to care more about what they had for lunch or the activities at the Boys and Girls Club, but they all had their own experiences to add.
“They’re not as sheltered as we thought they were,” Osman said.
There were particularly difficult moments in Lowertown, where the scheduled photography session happened shortly after a shooting in front of the community house where an 18-year-old was killed.
Omer says it became an opportunity for people in that neighbourhood to talk and share what that feels like.
“I was thinking, this is when the community wants their voice heard,” she said. “Let me see what this neighbourhood wants the rest of Ottawa to know about them right now.”
As a psychotherapist, Omer says the sessions became not just about the photos, but also helping the youth process a traumatic event and validate their feelings about it.
“You have to stop and give them that respect .. that eye contact while they’re speaking, ‘I can’t believe that happened, I’m sorry,'” she explained, adding that hearing those stories was hard on her, too, but talking it over with her siblings always helped.
Still, Omer says she came away from the project seeing the pride the youth had in their neighbours and communities — a sentiment echoed by Osman.
“There’s a lot of bad press when it comes to certain neighbourhoods in the city and people don’t see the positive side of it,” he said. “This was something that was going to shed light on neighbourhoods that don’t really get the limelight that they deserve.”
Since wrapping up this project, Omer has started a new chapter of her life. In January, she began a new job as a counsellor at Carleton University.
Her family also moved to a newly built home in Findlay Creek this May, with enough room for their parents and all seven siblings,six of whom are over 20 — a bittersweet change for Omer.
“I feel like if you live somewhere for more than two decades, it definitely becomes part of your identity,” she said.
“I’m proud to be from Ritchie, and all the other neighbourhoods that I grew up in, because it made me who I am today.”
