MEREDITH — The Meredith Sculpture Walk will celebrate its 10-year anniversary, with Meredith Village Savings Bank as its anniversary presenting sponsor.
Merdith Sculpture Walk plans events for 10th anniversary
Photographer Captures the Eccentric People of California
A photographer traveled to California to meet some of the weird and wonderful people who call the Golden State home.
California, and Los Angeles in particular, is a huge magnet for people who want to realize their dreams and live out their fantasies. For her latest project, California Dreamers, Sally Davies met a vast array of West Coast dwellers including everyday folk and notable figures.
“I didn’t know that many people there, so I just got started with who I did have,” Davies tells PetaPixel. “Those people recommended their friends — people they thought would be good additions to the project.”
“I also had people in New York that had been in my New Yorkers book call their California friends and insist they join the West Coast project. That started a chain reaction and the saying, ‘It takes a village’ was really true. I left each photo shoot with at least one or two new people to contact,” adds the photographer.
As Davies mentions, she shot a similar project in New York where she delved into the famous apartments on Manhattan Island and the people who live there.
New Yorkers was released during Covid when people were locked inside their homes. But after the project was finished, Davies wanted to keep exploring this style of portraiture.
“I had been spending time in California the last few years and had a hunch that it might be my next book,” she says.
“You never know until you try something, but the response to California Dreamers has been off the hook. I guess the interest in each other’s stories and homes has outlived Covid.”
Capturing the California Dreamers
Davies says that on her first trip, she photographed “about a dozen people” and came back to shoot the rest in the following two months.
“It was full pedal to the metal but with the help of my assistant Vin who had a car, we got it done,” she says.
“We would cover as much territory on those car days as humanly possible, sometimes photographing two or three people in one day.
“Each person was given a Q&A prior to our photo shoot, so I already had that done when we took their photo.”
Davies says she learned from her first project in New York that bringing lights wasn’t necessarily a good idea.
“As I was setting them up I could feel the person getting uneasy and a bit nervous. It took too long and the energy changed” she explains.
“So after that, I just used an on-camera flash that I bounced off the ceiling. I just needed to make sure the people and their treasures were well-lit.”
Davies uses a Sony a7R with an 18mm wide lens attached and her shoots were quick, taking no longer than 20 minutes and sometimes being done in five.
“I tried not to manipulate the moment. I just wanted to photograph the person quickly before either of us started overthinking the shot,” she adds.
California Dreamers is available from Ammonite Press. More of Davies’ work can be found on her website, Instagram, and Facebook.
Image credits: All photos by Sally Davies.
Australian Geographic nature photographer of the year 2023
Junior winner: Hidden Courage
Although it’s a petrifying first sight, ask yourself who is more scared right now? Since this is only a photograph, a paused juncture in time, you missed a vital moment. You missed the glimpse of her spiderlings hidden behind her, the moment she became a courageous mother in my eyes. Sunshine Coast, Queensland
Photograph: Isabella Alexis
Recycled Fishing Nets Find Life as 3D-Printed Philips MyCreation Lamps
Designer Aleksandra Gaca’s pioneering efforts across the realm of 3D-woven textiles has won her acclaim for materials exhibiting a rhythmic topological complexity hinting of movement or even growth. Fearlessly experimental, Gaca’s weaving techniques have appeared within the interior cabin of a concept car, across 3D woven textile acoustic panels, and applied to her own chic shawl. Open to new challenges, Gaca partnered with Philips MyCreation to explore utilizing recycled fishing nets to “weave” a series of luminaires into the brand’s Coastal Breeze collection.
Manufactured completely with recycled synthetic polymeric fibers, all four pendant designs are composed of innumerable layers printed to evoke the textures of sand dunes, rippling water, and fish scales, each exhibiting the same characteristic blue green color of the fishing nets from which they were born from. A pleasing benefit of reusing the recycled synthetic polymers is the subtle gradient from green to yellow that only becomes visible when illuminated.
Small irregularities in the 3D-printing process are embraced by Gaca as a unique fingerprint each made-to-print light exhibits.
“I find inspiration in geometric and abstract shapes in architecture, and patterns found in nature,” explains Gaca. “My main focus is on developing designs that offer sensory experiences, just like the way nature does. I want to create fabrics that are not just visually appealing but also offer a tactile and even auditory experience, all contributing to a better living and working environment.”
Philips sourced the discarded fishing nets in collaboration with Fishy Filaments in Cornwall, United Kingdom to help reuse a portion of the 200,000 tons of new fishing net manufactured annually. The technology giant then needed to develop a new process to handle the material, first sorting, cleaning, then melting the nets to eventually be reformed into a 100% recycled filament that could be used to translate Gaca’s soft textile geometric patterns into solid lighting objects.
Previous 3D-printed luminaries within the MyCreation catalog were made with at least 55% recycled or bio-circular materials. The Coastal Breeze collection is the brand’s first using 100% recycled materials.
ThePhilips MyCreation Coastal Breeze collection is just one of numerous 3D-printed design styles the brand now manufactures on demand. There’s also Icelandic-inspired lamps, Japanese lantern designs, and intricately textured table lamps made to look and feel like wicker, amongst numerous other contemporary options.
With plastic waste being an enormous environmental issue, sustainable design will require more companies to adopt similar bio-circular sourcing and manufacturing processes, scaled to become the rule, rather than the exception to reduce carbon emissions, eliminate waste, and create a circular economy where plastic is reused in perpetuity.
Bruce Davidson Digs Deep and Finds Gems He Had Overlooked
In the exhibition “The Way Back,” the photographer presents unseen outtakes from his nearly 70-year career as a chronicler of American life.
Breathtakingly fast and painstakingly slow: Before the introduction of the digital camera, a photographer worked in those parallel time frames. The click of the shutter was instantaneous, but then the film had to be developed, the contact sheets or color slides reviewed, and the selections made for printing.
Pressed for time, a working photographer typically made these decisions hurriedly. In old age, there is time for reconsideration. Bruce Davidson, who turns 90 next month, has been reviewing his archive for the last eight years. In “The Way Back,” the title both of an exhibition now at the Howard Greenberg Gallery, in New York, and a more compendious book to be published this fall, he is presenting photos he overlooked, putting them on public view for the first time.
In a 2015 interview, Davidson named for me some photographers he thought had taken the art form to “a new departure point”: Eugène Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus. He did not include himself. He knows he has followed trails blazed by pioneers. What makes him remarkable is the empathy that won over his subjects and the devoted persistence of his investigations.
Frank, who is probably Davidson’s greatest influence, restlessly sought to portray scenes and people new to him; it is one reason he did not enjoy or succeed at the lucrative task of crafting photo essays for Life magazine. In contrast, Davidson has preferred to mine the same subject for months or years, getting so close to people that you come to feel you know them yourself.
Davidson broke into professional photography at Life. Fascinated by the camera from the time he was 10, he was encouraged by his stepfather, who advised him to apply to the Rochester Institute of Technology. From there, he went to study photography at Yale, where his photographs of the college football team garnered five pages in Life. In his 20s, he had begun his professional career.
In an early series on the circus in 1958, he took intimate photographs of Jimmy Armstrong, a clown with dwarfism. He showed Armstrong playing the trumpet in a shabby bedroom, depositing cash at a bank window, performing in makeup and costume, and eating a sandwich alone in a diner. The book “The Way Back” includes another version of the previously published trumpet picture, taken from a greater distance and a lower angle to reveal Armstrong’s living quarters. It discloses more but delivers a slightly lower impact. It made me think of a jazz singer’s alternate version, in which you can better discern the lyrics but lose a bit of the mood.
The risk of unlimited empathy is sentimentality, a pitfall that tripped up a youthful Davidson at times in his pictures, including those of Armstrong and another favorite subject, an elderly Parisian widow. His breakthrough came soon enough, in 1959, when he embedded himself with a Brooklyn gang of teenagers who ruled a bit of turf in pre-gentrified Park Slope. Like a sputtering match, the kids saunter, primp and canoodle for Davidson’s camera, before they will ineluctably succumb — as Davidson’s wife, Emily Haas Davidson, established in a 1998 interview with a former gang member — to addiction, despair and suicide.
One classic photograph (which surpasses anything in this collection of outtakes) portrays a beautiful young woman with remarkable eyebrows smoking a cigarette and pushing back her hair, as she looms, knowing and defiant, above three of her friends who are intertwined on a blanket in Prospect Park. (At the gallery, she can be seen, charismatic as ever, in another shot where she has joined them on the blanket.) It is a memorably poignant image that would make a nice pendant to one of the Brooklyn gang pictures in the Greenberg show — a boy standing on a gritty street with cupped hands catching the rain.
Along with the Brooklyn gang, which is the best represented, there are also alternate takes at the gallery from two other major Davidson projects: his documentation of the civil rights struggle in the South in the ’60s, including those he took while traveling with the Freedom Riders; and a two-year immersion with a large-format camera among the hard-pressed Hispanic and Black residents of East 100th Street in East Harlem. In both, he crossed the racial divide and earned the trust of his subjects.
But the two pictures in this rediscovered trove that stick with me most are from lesser known undertakings. Both feature women with big hair. In a photograph taken in the Bronx in 1963, a young Hispanic man clutches a box of what appear to be candy bars in one hand while he leads off a woman whose white headband accents a bouffant flip. Her stare at the photographer — and therefore at the viewer of the photograph — is what arrests you: direct, tough and savvy beyond her years.
The other portrait was taken in Yosemite National Park in 1965, part of a series Davidson made of people relaxing at a camp site. A wry rejoinder to the wilderness photographs made there a century before by Carleton Watkins, Davidson’s pictures displayed how Yosemite by this time catered not so much to adventurers but to citified tourists, like a young woman with a startling beehive hairdo who sits placidly at a picnic table laden with her provisions. A big gas-guzzling car is parked beyond her. Sharp but not mocking, the Yosemite picture, like the civil rights and East 100th Street projects, was Davidson’s report on what he found in America. Neither doom-saying nor starry-eyed, he was simply being observant. And honest.
Bruce Davidson: The Way Back
Through Sept. 16, Howard Greenberg Gallery, 41 East 57th St, Manhattan; 212 334-0010, howardgreenberg.com
Same Dress Spokane may share same dress, but photography ranges widely
Local business owner is holding Elizabethton photography contest
A Spa That Merges Contemporary Amenities With Age-Old Traditions
THE WELL at Chileno Bay is a spa transformation located within the Chileno Bay Resort & Residences, Auberge Resorts Collection, designed by Nina Gotlieb. This marks the brand’s first foray on the West Coast and its second on an international stage. THE WELL at Chileno Bay covers a vast 22-acre desert expanse in Los Cabos, Mexico, artfully merging contemporary amenities with age-old traditions.
Among the attractions are a distinctive Bath House, a peaceful Nap Garden, a Reflexology Pool, and open-air treatment rooms. The Bath House offers therapeutic sessions, incorporating regional healing practices. Adjacent to it, the Reflexology Pool and Nap Garden provide a tranquil setting for relaxation, with the pool designed to stimulate reflex points.
New York-based designer Nina Gotlieb transformed the interiors by drawing from Baja’s vast landscapes. The meditation lounge, equipped with suspended beds and a central fire feature, exudes a sense of calm, while the retail space showcases wellness products set against earthy textures and tones.
Photography courtesy of Auberge Resorts Collection.
Quick tips for overhead food photography
I was in Colorado Springs sharing some overhead food photography techniques for commercial photography with the Professional Photographers Guild of Colorado Springs (PPGCS). I highly recommend their group if you live anywhere near the area to network and learn photography skills. They bring in speakers from around the country with lots of different specialties. A very active and welcoming group!
Overhead food photography
This can be a great setup for capturing a lot of food dishes in a short period of time. Once the set is in place and the lighting is correct you are good to keep moving different dishes through. You’ll still need to work on the images in postproduction but your time in the restaurant will be relatively minimal. And, clients love it when you don’t impede on business hours.
To make this overhead food photography setup work well, not having a tripod on the set is critical. It is way too easy to bump a leg while you are making images. The cleaner the set, the faster the job goes.
I use a Platypod eXtreme as the base. You could also use a Platypod Ultra as well. Two Platypod Handles are attached to the base for the rise. This can give you a camera height between 14 inches and approximately 22 inches. Depending upon plate sizes these heights are perfect. A Platyball or other strong ball head is on top of the Handles and another Handle is used to move the camera over the product. An additional ball head supports the camera.
Key to this set is to have a woodworkers clamp to secure everything to the table. Without the clamp the weight of the camera will be too heavy to stay in place. This is an inexpensive set of clamps. The squeezy handles are the type I recommend as you can tighten them quickly and release them with a tap as well. By the way, you can never have enough clamps on a commercial set!
Charcuterie board
Part of the beauty of a good food shot is the styling. If you can work with a professional stylist all the better. But often, you will find yourself styling the food while working with the owner or chef. If you have hot food coming through in the beginning you might want to work with a stand in plate of food then when the lighting has been perfected it’s time for the hero to arrive under the camera.
One of my students, Tara Patty did a great job of sourcing the materials to photograph! Meanwhile Elane Graves, did a great job of styling the board with the fruit, tomatoes, bread, cheese and sliced meat. While waiting for the food to complete, I also finished the lighting. You want to have light crossing the food to give it shape and form with soft shadow edge transitions and lovely highlights. A single light behind a diffusion scrim accomplished this. You find those inside a five way reflector. A piece of white foam core can serve as the fill light, angled opposite the main light. If you need deeper shadows, a black board can help with that.
Post production
You will want to keep your set as clean as possible. Because we were working fast to show as many different setups as possible, some crumbs were allowed during the shot. No worries. Using the Dust and Scratches filter in Photoshop cleaned that up with a click. I selected the charcuterie board using Photoshop’s “Select Subject” and placed it on a layer above the Dust and Scratches filter layer.
Final post production tweaks
To complete the photo, finishing touches included using the Clone Tool to remove stray breadcrumbs on the cutting board, a sharpening layer for selective sharpening and a Soft Light layer to refine the highlight and shadows. NIK Filters Color Efex Pro 5 added some Tonal Contrast for structure with some Glamour Glow to add some nummyness. By the way, nummy is a technical term I use to describe warm and yummy in a scene that gets really tasty!
Let me know if you have any questions or other ideas for making this type of image stronger in the comments section below.
Your in Creative Photography, Bob
The Sculpture Center and Artists Archives of the Western Reserve to expand galleries
After sharing space for more than 20 years, the center and the archives will both have larger spaces to exhibit art in separate buildings.
