These days we are all photographers, right? Actually, snappers or documenters might be a more accurate description. And while the pictures Hodaya Kalman-Book had on display at the Social Space (in the former President Hotel building on Ahad Ha’am Street) over the last fortnight, could be classified as realistic and, yes, documentary, they are plainly the work of an artist, someone who has a firm grasp of the discipline, as well as the local lay of the land. The spread was curated by Maya Bamberger.

Kalman-Book has a lot on her young hands. As the 23-year-old mother of 16-month-old twin daughters, she somehow managed to complete a four-year study program at the Emunah Academic College of Arts and Design. She spent some time considering her options for her final project, eventually realizing that the old adage, “there’s no place like home” applied here too.

In fact, it was when she learned that her home patch was poised to change, possibly out of all recognition, that she realized it was high time she moved up a gear or two and got herself and her camera out and about.

Kalman-Book lives in that most grassroots of Jerusalem neighborhoods, Katamon or, as the locals call it, the Katamonim. To be clear, this is not the largely genteel Old Katamon part of town. This is the working class stratum of the urban socioeconomic hierarchy.

KALMAN-BOOK and her husband moved into the neighborhood two and a half years ago, blissfully ignorant of the plans the municipality had for the area. She says it was a shock when reality dawned that a pinui binui – “evacuation and reconstruction” – scheme was in the works, and that her physical milieu, including the very building in which she lived, was about to get a fundamental makeover. 

THE SOCIAL fabric in the Katamonim is about to change forever. (credit: Hodaya Kalman-Book)

“I decided I needed to do something, for my final project, that I loved. And I love photography,” she says.

That, then, was going to be her chosen vehicle of expression to try to get the word out about the transformation that is about to descend on her surroundings. 

A photographer’s project: Taking pictures of Katamonim as it disappears 

“I have been taking photographs for a few years now. I also work in that – taking pictures of events, families, and such like.”

Any photographer worth their salt will tell you that you have to prepare the groundwork before you sling your camera over your shoulder and set off for your location of choice. Of course, that doesn’t always apply when you are a photojournalist trying to relay images to the world from some battleground. But Kalman-Book had no such logistical considerations to ponder. She was going to document her own home patch, a place where she knew many of the locals and was familiar with the bricks-and-mortar fixtures.

“It took me a while to decide exactly what it is I want to do, and I came to the conclusion that I want to engage in the space around me,” she explains. That “space” meant the whole fabric of life – human, physical, and natural. 

“There are some special people who live here, and there are unique buildings. Everything is going to completely change. It will be unrecognizable when they have finished here.” 

THE PROJECT duly evolved, partly with planned excursions and partly with a more of an opportunist mindset. 

“There were days when I set with an agenda – what and where I was going to shoot. But there were days when, say, I’d go off to the makolet, talk to people on the way, and I’d have my camera with me. It became part of my daily routine. I’d take my daughters to the neighborhood garden and I’d talk to people and sometimes take their picture.”

That familiarity, and the ease of the subjects, came across in the portrait works in the exhibition. These were the smiling faces of characters you can come across every day of the week in certain parts of the city, particularly the less well-heeled areas. The subjects clearly knew Kalman-Book was on their side and were happy to cooperate. 

“That was what was special about this work,” she says. “It was being part of the place, of the ambiance, and getting to know people close up.”

That was very much the photographer’s aesthetic and professional line of attack for the project. This was more about the basic human component than the irreversible structural process the district is about to undergo, and the implications that it would have on street-level life there. 

“There is the saying that ‘a person is nothing but the shape of his native landscape’,” she says quoting from a poem by celebrated Hebrew language Russian-born poet Shaul Tchernichovsky.

Kalman-Book feels there is a symbiotic relationship between humans and the structures in which they live and work, and encounter on a daily basis. “People are very much impacted by the area in which they live. There is something which is not quite harmony, but there is something special shared between people and the buildings that are important to them, in Jerusalem and other places.”

But it is the capital where Kalman-Book lives, breathes, and works and, particularly, her own backyard which interests her the most and that she set out to lovingly document for her final project.

It has been a voyage of discovery for her, on various levels. “I am a born and bred Jerusalemite, from Kiryat Moshe,” she says. “Maybe it’s not a nice thing to say, but I didn’t know anything about the Katamonim before we moved there. It is not the kind of place you stumble across on your way somewhere else.”

It is no secret that Jerusalem is reaching for the sky, as ever-increasing tower blocks spring up all over the show. The southern reaches of Derech Hebron, for example, are now unrecognizable compared with just five or six years ago, as apartment buildings of 20 or 30 floors have materialized there.

I wondered whether that came into Kalman-Book’s line of thought as she snapped away in her neighborhood. She preferred not to take sides on the urban skyline issue. 

“This project is about people. I am not addressing the matter of whether it is good or bad [to completely change the physical milieu]. Jerusalem is developing. It is a process that has to take place. I am interested in relating to people, the people – the simple folk – that live in the Katamonim. They just get on with their lives. I wanted to provide a platform for people whose lives are about to change. I am not looking to say if it is good or bad.”

She did, however, get the local lowdown on the impending game-changer. She says it is far from an open-and-shut case scenario. 

“I tried to speak to as many people as possible. There are some who don’t believe it is going to happen. Some are waiting for it to happen. Some don’t even think about it. There is going to be a change. I set out to show what there is there now, and what is going to change.”

Intriguingly, most of the photos in the exhibition – all except two – were printed on cloth. 

“Yes, and they were hung on a line, like a clothesline, attached with pegs,” Kalman-Book notes. That, she says, was designed to bring a whiff of her homestead to the Social Space. 

“Clotheslines are something that is very characteristic of the neighborhood, like in times gone by.”

She was keen to impart a sense of simplicity and of folk who just go about their everyday lives, minding their own business, until that is rudely interrupted by some more powerful outside force. 

“I sometimes have the feeling that they [the authorities] in Jerusalem do just what they want with these kinds of neighborhoods because the people that live there don’t have the ability to influence or change things. This [pinui binui] is going to have a drastic effect on their lives, whether they like it or not.”

Kalman-Book would certainly like to do something about it or, at the very least, provide the locals with a mouthpiece and a means of telling the world what is about to unfold in one of the poorer quarters of the capital. But does she really believe her work can make a difference? Does she have faith in the ability of artists and their art to generate change? 

“I do believe in the power of pictures,” she declares. “Just the mere fact that we are talking about this means I have managed to proffer an issue from a different angle. Lots of people talk about pinui binui. It is a burning issue in Jerusalem and all over Israel. What is special about pictures is that they remain.” 

Unlike, it seems, the building over in the Katamonim. 

“A few years down the road, regardless of what remains here, there will be a document. This won’t be forgotten. I would like to believe that my work can have some impact. At least I am doing my bit.”

College head Dr. Efrat Grossman believes in the power of art to make a difference and has faith in the efforts of Kalman-Book and her fellow students to generate desirable shifts on the sociopolitical scene. 

“Hodaya’s work, in her unique frames, commemorates a neighborhood that is gradually vanishing and commemorates a time, atmosphere, and people. All the works in the exhibition were created through an immersive inner process that all the students underwent. Their output reflects the ideas and personal and social values they chose to advance and bring to the light of day.”

Interestingly, it is not only about Kalman-Book’s neighbors, who feature in a work that is, essentially, about her domestic environs. There are a couple of shots with happy-looking Asian foreign workers in there too. “She takes pictures of people who are there, in the neighborhood,” Bamberger observes. 

“For Hodaya it doesn’t make any difference if they have been there for a few years, like her and her family, or were born and bred there, or are foreigners just passing through. It is all part of the same social fabric.”

That comes through in the structural, human, and flora and fauna elements of the exhibition. The faces she captured chatting on a bench, out with their dog, or peeping a little warily out of their home base are people she knows and cares about. 

“She photographs the domain in which she lives,” says Bamberger. “I think she has developed a special sensitivity to the people there, the way they look at life. She captures their humaneness.”

One shot, in particular, spells out the impending transformation which, no doubt, will not only change the local aesthetics but will have a powerful bearing on the social and human fabric there. 

The picture shows an unassuming four-story apartment building. The exterior is mottled with air conditioners and laundry hanging on clotheslines, with old TV antennae protruding from the roof into the leaden wintry sky. To the right, in front of the building, there is a large billboard showing three tightly-packed tower blocks, naturally with unblemished blues skies and plenty of green spaces around. The slogan on the billboard reads: “Growing together with you.” 

That, clearly, is a matter of human or other perspective. ❖

A P.E.I. nature and wildlife photographer has captured what he considers the photos of a lifetime after finally catching up with a roaming and very rare eagle. 

Glen Strickey, who since 2020 has been tracking sightings of the only known Steller’s sea eagle in North America, was able to snap some images of the bird in Spaniards Cove on the east coast of Newfoundland this summer. 

He said it was a surreal experience.

“I’ve been watching this happen over the last couple of years, thinking, ‘God, I’d love to see this bird and get a photo of it.’ It looked incredible,” he told CBC’s Island Morning.

“It’s pretty spectacular. It’s the only Steller’s eagle in all of North America and it’s just a gift to be able to see something like that. Nature never ceases to amaze me in its beauty.”

It just kind of takes your breath away.— Glen Strickey, P.E.I. nature and wildlife photographer

Not only was the eagle itself a beautiful sight, but so was the surrounding scenery during his excursion to Newfoundland, with “icebergs around and whales jumping around … it was quite spectacular,” he said.

“The cove was like something straight out of Jurassic Park, with 250 to 500 cliffs all around it,” Strickey wrote on his Facebook page. “The Steller’s eagle has seemed to become a part of the eagle community there and is often seen around other eagles.”

Just missed it before

Strickey said he’s narrowly missed the chance to photograph the eagle on multiple occasions. The raptor was spotted in Nova Scotia the day after he’d finished a visit to family in the area. He also missed the bird in New Brunswick because he wasn’t able to make it there when it was spotted.

After monitoring the bird’s flight patterns at various times of year, he was certain it would be in Newfoundland in early summer, so he and his wife decided to head to the province and take a boat tour leaving from the Bonavista Peninsula, a well-known area for bird-watching about a three-hour drive from St. John’s.

“Nature doesn’t always give you what you want, but I had a good feeling that it was going to return to the same area because it was there all last summer,” he said of the eagle.

The species’ normal habitat ranges from northern Russia to northeast Asia, but this specific individual had been spotted around Texas and Maine before making its way to Atlantic Canada.

“The Steller’s sea-eagle was named for a noted 18th-century zoologist and explorer, Georg Wilhelm Steller,” says a description on the San Diego Zoo website. “It is considered the most powerful and aggressive of its closest relatives, the bald eagle and the white-tailed sea-eagle.”

Strickey said the path the eagle took to get all the way to eastern Newfoundland made the moment when he laid eyes on it extra special.

“When you think about it, it’s absolutely mind-blowing, the journey this bird makes,” he said. “To be able to find this one and see in person this one bird that made this incredible journey — it just kind of takes your breath away.”

A photographer created a stunning 360-degree star trail image with the northern lights glowing brightly.

360 photographer Christoph Simon created the unusual image after visiting a remote part of Iceland — with his final star trail panoramic image containing an incredible 834 photos. The 360 images can be viewed here.

Note: To see the star trail panoramics, select the menu button and scroll down where you will find the star trail panoramics.

Creating a 360-Degree Star Trail Panoramic Image

Simon took the photos on a Sony a7R III with an 8mm fish eye lens attached, this gives a 90-degree field of view. He took four photos covering north, west, south, and east and then a nadir shot, which is of the floor.

Then to create the star trail image, Simon shot 829 photos over the course of an hour and a half which were later stacked and stiched into a single image.

Once the German photographer had the star trail image and the other five photos, he stitched them together using the PTGUI software.

“The biggest challenge was blending the base panorama with the stacked star trail sky,” Simon tells PetaPixel.

“By adding the brightness of the 829 individual shots, the stacked sky differs somewhat from the basic panorama. In order to get that right, I stitched the panorama in PTGUI and output the individual layers separately. I then masked them manually in Photoshop to create perfect transitions.”

It’s a complex image that requires a deep knowledge of 360 photography. But technicalities weren’t Simon’s only problem.

“A big challenge was actually the temperature when taking photos,” he explains.

“The night was very cold at -15 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Fahrenheit) and if you stand outside for several hours and don’t move much, it gets quite chilly.”

Simon took the photos in Westfjords, a peninsula in northwestern Iceland, and was lucky enough to have a dazzling display of the aurora borealis when he was there.

“The footage for this project was shot on a cold, clear night in a beautiful valley,” he says.

“The aurora activity was high and so we had perfect conditions for several hours. Not only very bright but also very colorful, different colored northern lights showed up that night.”

Simon has been working as a professional 360 photographer and videographer for more than 10 years.

More of his work can be found on his website and Facebook.

Image credits: Photos by Christoph Simon unless otherwise stated.

So you’ve found your perfect spot to capture the night sky. The weather is perfect and you’ve been tracking the stars and planets for weeks to capture this moment. But, when that perfect moment comes, the pictures you’ve captured end up hazy and soft. Why? Likely due to excessive light pollution from the surrounding area, especially if you’re nearby a larger city.

If you happen to find yourself in one of those densely packed cities, it can be quite hard to find a place to take a nice shot of the night sky without traveling for dozens if not hundreds of miles. Even after hours of driving to the location, you can still be left with large pockets of light pollution from the bright city lights off in the distance reflecting in the sky which will reduce the contrast and depth of your otherwise perfect shot.

So what can be done to help correct this without spending days traveling out into the middle of nowhere? Well, if long travel days are out of the question, using K&F CONCEPT Light Pollution Filters can help significantly improve those night sky images.

Full Disclosure: This sponsored story is brought to you by K&F CONCEPT.

What Causes Light Pollution?

Even though some planets and stars are bright enough to be seen with the naked eye, capturing great images of these celestial bodies can be more than a challenge thanks to Light Pollution. As the International Dark Sky Organization puts it, “Light pollution is a side effect of industrial civilization, Its sources include building exterior and interior lighting, advertising, commercial properties, offices, factories, streetlights, motor vehicles (including airplanes and helicopters), fires, and illuminated sporting venues. This light, and the electricity used to create it, is being wasted by spilling it into the sky, rather than focusing it on to the actual objects and areas that people want to be illuminated.”

This excess light bleeds into the surrounding night sky for miles where it is bounced back by even the smallest amounts of humidity and clouds in the atmosphere, effectively making even a perfectly clear night feel strangely yellow and eerie. This “haze” is generally created by yellow-orange sodium and mercury-vapor lights that produce a very specific wavelength of light that can sometimes even show a green/cyan glow depending on the conditions.

To help you eliminate some of the excess light pollution from your shots, it might be worth using a Light Pollution Map or App such as Clear Dark Sky or Light Pollution Map to help you figure out the darkest area near you.

What Are Light Pollution Filters/How Do They Work?

To understand what a physical light pollution filter (LPF) is, you need to first to know how they work. Filters, no matter what kind, will subtract or block a percentage of incoming light, and can never add to the light taken in by the camera. What they can do, however, is block unwanted light (like light pollution from city lights) and isolate a specific target range between 575nm and 600nm from the visible light spectrum. As a result, photographers can see the desired light source (in this case, the night sky full of stars and galaxies) much clearer than you would otherwise have been able to.

These filters work effectively because most outdoor light sources do not shine evenly across the visible light spectrum, and as such they emit radiation in a few select wavelengths. A clear example of this is most older high-pressure sodium streetlights. These create light in mostly the yellow wavelength and the K&F CONCEPT Light Pollution Filters suppress/reduce those and similar wavelengths, allowing you to capture much cleaner night skies.

It’s worth noting that LPF’s can’t cover every unwanted wavelength, and can’t do much about car headlights and incandescent bulbs that produce light at nearly every visible wavelength, so you should be prepared on that front.

Basically, Light Pollution Filters allow almost all visible blue and red light through, blocks about half of the greens, and almost entirely eliminates all but about 5-10% of the yellow-orange polluting light through them.

Why Should You Use Light Pollution Filters?

The answer to this is rather simple; By using a K&F CONCEPT light pollution filter, the effective yellow/orange light pollution usually found near the horizon can be reduced or even eliminated in your captured photographs, making your images of the night sky significantly improved.

Something you should keep in mind when using these filters is you will often have to adjust for an additional 1/3 to 2/3 stop of light. This is not necessarily a huge deal, but worth remembering when planning and setting up your shots. Additionally, if you opt for some of the cheaper versions, they can leave “artifacts” (such as blooming, color tings, chromatic aberration, aliasing, additional noise, and moire). Proper multicoated filters (like the K&F CONCEPT) will reduce or eliminate most if not all of these possible artifacts.

Types of K&F CONCEPT Light Pollution Filters

Depending on your personal preferences, the K&F CONCEPT Light Pollution Filters are available in both Circular and Square formats giving you the option of mounting the filters directly to your lenses, or with the use of special mounts that can allow for combinations of filters to be used together.

The K&F CONCEPT Filters are made of Japanese AGC Glass with 28 layers of nanometer multi-coating exceptional water, dust, oil, glare, reflection and scratch resistance, while creating little to no color shift/casts.

Design and Build Quality

As mentioned above, the NANO-X Circular Light Pollution filters from K&F CONCEPT are resistant to scratches and water damage, so it’s an ideal filter to take with you on adventures and stargazing trips. The filter ships in a tough and durable plastic case with rubber grips to keep the filter from shaking around inside the case while in transit, helping ensure it will remain in its best condition for as long as possible.

The filter has a double-sided nano-coating to block orange and yellow wavelengths of light with a scratch and dust-resistant coating that also boasts High Definition (HD) visibility (meaning sharp and no ghosting/fogginess) with low reflection and no vignetting along the edges. The aviation aluminum alloy filter itself is very thin and lightweight, with the CNC frame coming in at just 3.8 millimeters in height and weighing just 24.6 grams.

The Circular version of this filter is available from $32.99 to $64.99 in 52mm, 58mm, 67mm, 72mm, 77mm, and 82mm thread sizes and is also double-threaded allowing you to combine the filter with others (stacking) for even more creative choices while capturing your images.

Should you prefer square filters, the K&F CONCEPT Light Pollution filters are available in that format also in both the raw glass and with a protective Metal Frame and should fit any standard square filter holder.

That being said, we used the metal-framed filter using the K&F CONCEPT filter holder and step-up rings so that the system could easily connect to any lens in our bags.

The K&F CONCEPT square filter holder is able to hold two square filters as well as an internal “circular” filter like a circular polarizer (CPL). This was an impressive feature as it allowed for the CPL to be rotated quickly and easily while square filters were mounted using a built-in mechanical wheel on the side of the frame. (The square system with the light pollution filter weights just 188.6 grams).

The filter(s) for the square system each come with their own protective case to keep the filters safe from dust, water, scratches, and breaking while not in use.

The holder also features a smooth felt material on the filter side to reduce any chance of scratching the filters while inserting or removing them from the system and includes a metal, spring-loaded locking mechanism that makes it easy to quickly mount and remove the entire system from the adapter rings. This system made it incredibly easy to swap the filters from one camera to another while using different lenses with different adapter rings on them, allowing for quick focal length changes between cameras.

We paired both sets of filters with a K&F CONCEPT X284C2 Carbon Fiber Tripod during our time with the filters which allowed for some very fast, and very sturdy setups in multiple locations of our night-sky testing.

Additional Images captured using the K&F CONCEPT Light Pollution Filters

Are the K&F CONCEPT Light Pollution Filters Worth It?

The Square and Circular light pollution filters from K&F CONCEPT are very tough and durable in their design making them incredibly handy when used in the middle of nowhere. There was very little worry about any dirt, dust, or moisture on the filters causing any damage or scratches, and on top of that, they were actually very useful for cutting out the orange and yellow light pollution haze & color cast from night-sky images.

So yes, these Light Pollution Filters are actually very useful for landscape, street, and astrophotographers to help them capture cleaner images of the night skies, and they can even help enhance sunset images.

The NANO-X Circular K&F CONCEPT Light Pollution filters range in size from 52mm to 82mm and are available for $35.99 to $71.99 per filter depending on the size of the filter mount, and the NANO-X PRO Square filters are available from $81 to $109 depending on if you prefer the metal frame or not. Additionally, the Filters will also be on a Prime Day Sale on July 11 and 12.

K&F CONCEPT focuses on making photo and video cameras and accessories and has over 200 patents for those products. Currently, the company’s gear is sold in 56 countries and regions with over 300 business partners as well as being ranked among one of Amazon’s Top Best Sellers with a total of four products that have been honored with the 2023 Red Dot Award for Product Design, including a camera backpack, two tripods, and a switch cleaning pen.

Welcome to a PetaPixel Showcase, in which our staff gives you a hands-on with unique and interesting products from across the photography landscape. The Showcase format affords manufacturers the opportunity to sponsor hands-on time with their products and our staff, and it lets them highlight what features they think are worth noting, but the opinions expressed from PetaPixel staff are genuine. Showcases should not be considered an endorsement by PetaPixel.