The Sugar Land Cultural Arts Division installed the first of four pieces in a sculptural bench series at Eldridge Park, Sugar Land officials announced in an Oct. 31 release.
Sugar Land installs 1st piece of Eldridge Park sculptural bench series
A Comprehensive Guide to Architectural Photography
Architectural photography is a challenging and rewarding genre that requires a lot of technical know-how and specialized skills. If you are interested in architectural photography and ready to grow, check out this fantastic video tutorial that features an experienced architectural photographer sharing in-depth knowledge about everything you need to know to create stunning images.
Coming to you from Ben Harvey Photography, this wonderful video tutorial will show you everything you need to know to create compelling architectural images, including the necessary gear, focal length, lighting, perspective, composition, post-processing, and much more. Architectural work can be a very technical pursuit, and because of that, a lot of photographers get the misconception that there is no room for an artistic approach in it, but nothing could be further from the truth. The technical side enables you to deal with issues like ensuring correct geometric rendering, but once you have that down, there is a ton of room to add your personal touch (and you absolutely should)! Check out the video above for the full rundown from Harvey.
And if you would really like to dive into architectural photography, be sure to check out the full range of tutorials on the topic in the Fstoppers store.
Take 5: A Spicy Kitchen Collab, MAXIMALISM, an MCM Kibble Dispenser + More
I love Omsom’s noodles and sauces, and this set that’s paired with a bright orange kitchen apron from Tilt is full of flavor. What’s included? Tilit makes super functional workwear for the kitchen, and the apron includes two sleeves for cooking chopsticks – one up top and one on the hip – for easy access. A pair of chopsticks made in Japan, which feature heat-safe silicon tips, will get you started. Here is where it gets tasty: Saucy Noodle boxes (1 Coconut Lemongrass Curry, 1 Chili Sesame, 1 Garlic Black Pepper, and 1 Soy Garlic) and Sauce Bundle (featuring both the Southeast Asian and East Asian Cooking Sauce lines) are also included. Trust me when I say you’ll thank yourself later.
We love minimalism, but can appreciate when more is definitely more. MAXIMALISM spans centuries, from the 1600s to today, including 220 residential interiors. The style has been with us in one form or another for over 400 years, and the tome features some truly extraordinary spaces that make paging through feel like a full-on experience. From Jonathan Adler to Dorothy Draper, and far beyond, the only word to describe this book is “gilded.”
This pair of slippers is where comfort and design align. Everyone seems to be a fan of the original design, and now London-based multidisciplinary artist Yinka Ilori has reimagined them. The limited supply footwear is available in three bold, bright prints that Ilori created, with meanings that tie back to his West African heritage. I think it might be time to replace last winter’s slippers that have seen better days.
Yes, these candle holders from Lostine would obviously be lovely during the holiday season – but they’d also be used every day for the rest of my life. I don’t know whether it’s the chunky, light maple wood (they’re also available in walnut) or the slim brass arms that have me hooked deeper. You can definitely see the tulip’s inspiration in their design, so maybe they can magically make winter feel like spring?
I must be on a mid-century modern kick right now, because this kibble dispenser immediately grabbed my attention. Clean, simple lines pair with integrated mechanics, furniture-grade plywood, and a miter-folded box for zero visible seams. Slightly lift and pull the locking lever that sits on top to release a perfectly portioned meal for your pet. The BPA-free plastic bin that sits inside can hold up to 30 lbs of food, depending on the size you choose. Is that the dinner bell I hear?
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Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi Runs through November 6
This year marks 25 years of Sculpture by the Sea. What started as a day long volunteer lead exhibtion has turned into a massive outdoor sculpture event. If you’re in the area you absolutely m…
See the giant sleeping troll statue a Marblehead architect built in his driveway
The troll moves, breathes, and conceals an enchanted forest behind its scraggly beard.
Pooch Doing Parkour Among the Winners of Dog Photography Awards
The winners of the 2023 Dog Photography Awards have been announced with a pooch doing parkour and a doberman performing ballet among the winners.
Four category winners were announced with $513 (500 Euros) being handed to each victor in the Portrait and Landscape category, the Action category, the Studio category, and the Dogs and People category.
Sanna Sander from Sweden took the photo of her azawakh (a breed of dog from West Africa) called Soleil climbing a pile of logs as the Sun falls on her serendipitously.
“Soleil (who’ll turn 10 in a month) is an avid fan of jumping up on things,” Sander writes on her Instagram page. “I do parkour/barkour every walk with her and she willingly held the pose for me while I took a few photos.”
For more about the competition, head to the Dog Photography Awards website.
Instagram’s Newest Food Photography Trend Is All About Afternoon Sun
I tell myself it’s the lighting in my apartment that has kept me from becoming an Instagram cooking sensation. I have southern exposure, perfect for growing tomatoes on my slip of a balcony but not for any sort of windowsill photo shoot. The sunlight is too harsh, the shadows too long, and I never seem to be able to find an angle that doesn’t reveal the silhouette of my hand over the bowl.
But if Instagram and TikTok are to be believed, now is my time. The gauzy, filtered light favored by social media food influencers just a few years ago has given way to what looks like perpetual late morning or late afternoon. In food photos, warm, direct sunlight makes for deeply saturated colors, and the occasional glint off of a shiny glaze, and everything is given extra definition by long, sharp shadows. It doesn’t even matter if your hand gets in the way, or if the light is dappled through leaves or window bars. This style of lighting has been embraced by restaurants, independent bloggers and more established chefs, everyone from Rick Martinez to Molly Baz to the New York Times.
Recipe developer Nasim Lahbichi says he began using this style of lighting, which I’ll call sun-and-shadows light, around 2020, and it was mostly out of necessity. His Brooklyn kitchen window is surrounded by neighboring buildings, limiting his access to natural light. But on sunny days there are a few hours where “beautiful direct sunlight shines through my kitchen, illuminating everything it touches.”
Sophie Waplington, aka @sophsplantkitchen, also makes use of the brief moment, she says around 20 minutes, when sun shines into her kitchen. She began noticing sun-and-shadows light more in food photography a few years ago and favored the look herself as she was starting out. She says she often waits to do her final shots when the light is right and the shadows are long. “If you’ve got something quite texturized like a chickpea dish, you can really pick up some interesting textures and shapes. I think that that really adds to a video and it helps subtly convey an emotion.” Colors look brighter, toasted bread looks crunchier. It makes you want to eat.
Capturing this light takes a lot of work. Lahbichi says he tries to shoot between 10 a.m. and noon on sunny days. He has an Ikea wooden work table next to the kitchen window, which he moves to catch the rays. In summer, this means things get overheated fast, and sometimes he has to put his phone in the freezer to cool it down. The bright, direct light can also make editing an issue. “Having colors washed out and shadows can be extremely difficult to work with when it comes to focusing on key subjects in the video,” he says.
Waplington says her schedule doesn’t always allow for waiting for that perfect moment, but it comes around 4 p.m., depending on the season. She also bought a smaller wooden table to shoot right next to the window and a hot plate so she can cook in the warm afternoon light. However, the hot plate makes a lot of noise, so sometimes she’ll run a dish from the stove to the table, while it’s still sizzling, to capture both the sound and the light.
Sun-and-shadows lighting conveys feelings of coziness and comfort in the food. “This lighting evokes a sense of home,” says Lahbichi. And importantly, it’s a sense of viewers’ own homes. Embracing direct sunlight is a departure from the diffused, slightly sterile lighting favored by food influencers even a few years ago, which made everyone’s feed look like it was shot in a professional kitchen. That light was meant to be placeless, a scene that could exist anywhere so theoretically anyone could connect with it. Here, the point is the specificity of the time of day.
For all the planning and waiting and extra supplies involved, shooting in this warm, direct light is ultimately meant to make things look not planned at all. “That kind of sun-kissed look being totally natural and it being unplanned, because it’s such a short window of time … it doesn’t feel staged,” says Waplington. “It just feels more authentic.” In general, influencers have shifted away from the impeccably staged in favor of the messier and more realistic. That authenticity is important currency on social media, where building a career requires that viewers feel a personal connection with creators.
So with this light, you are not just in any kitchen, you’re in their kitchen. And it’s not just any time, it’s a lazy, sunny afternoon. Maybe you can see the half-chopped garlic in the background, or the shadows of their fire escape shifting along the wall. It’s perfectly imperfect. It’s human. And it tells you that you don’t need professional lights to make something that looks this good. You could do it too. It could always be sunny in your kitchen.
Halloween: Artist’s desi designs bridge the gap between cultures
Manasi Arya Growing up, ghouls, ghosts and monsters weren’t the biggest fear for artist Manasi Arya at Halloween.
A first generation Indian-American immigrant, Manasi found it “difficult to fit in” at school during spooky season.
She wanted to dress up like other children but couldn’t, because the American holiday “wasn’t a thing” at home.
So instead of buying a Halloween costume, her mum would tell her to “just wear an Indian outfit”.
However, the mother-daughter pair entered a pumpkin competition with a design of an Indian woman wearing traditional jewellery.
After they won, Manasi realised that the two parts of her identity could co-exist.
Skeletons wearing jhumkas
Manasi says that experience inspired her collection of clothing featuring South Asian women in traditional cultural dress meshed with classic Halloween images.
For example, one of her T-shirts has the iconic mask that Ghostface wears in the horror movie franchise Scream, but with the addition of a red bindi dot on the forehead.
Another shows a skeleton wearing big Indian earrings known as jhumkas and a headpiece called a tikka.
Manasi said that there has been “an overwhelmingly positive response” to the line, which she started three years ago.
She says that Indian parents have thanked her for giving them a way to introduce their children to who they are in a “fun but educational” way.
But there is a more serious dimension to Manasi’s work, with debates about what’s acceptable to wear for Halloween circling on social media for some time.
Some people say it’s fine to dress up as the icons they look up to, while others criticise them for “cosplaying” characters from different cultures.
That’s something Black British influencer, activist and musician Solana has experienced herself.
Earlier this month Solana posted a TikTok about doing the the Leeds Otley Run – a popular student pub crawl – last year, when she encountered a white man wearing a “Jamaican” costume with an afro wig.
After seeing Solana and her black friends sitting across from him, she says the man removed the wig.
Solana says: “Why would they feel the need to do that if the costume they were wearing was okay?”
She insists “cultures are not costumes” and if people want to dress up “the focus should be less on cultural stereotypes” and more on emulating a personal sense of style.
Manasi says some costume choices owe a lot to people being “ignorant” of cultural dress and its origin.
She says she once confronted a white girl wearing a bindi, who did not know its significance to Hindus as a third eye and thought it was just a “pretty” decoration.
Manasi hopes her clothing line will provide people with a way to learn more about South Asian culture and open up a conversation about the line between appropriation and appreciation.
She says she’s “comfortable with anyone” wearing her clothing because it is “mostly T-shirts, sweaters, and denim”.
But it seems that her designs are giving younger people the inspiration Manasi missed when she was a child.
She says one young Indian girl told her she was “inspired” by her art, so dressed up as a “desi witch” for Halloween, complete with a green and black sari with a witch’s hat.
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Kinetic Botanical Sculptures by William Darrell Wriggle and Writhe in Hypnotic Motion
“Ostara.” All images © William Darrell, shared with permission
William Darrell describes his kinetic sculptures as “mechanically abstracted organisms,” animated forms that pulse, shimmy, and spin with lifelike motion. The London-based artist is inspired by the relationship between the organic and the mechanical along with the enticing, mesmerizing qualities of movement that can coax “fear or fascination” from the viewer. “There are cuttlefish that hypnotise their prey in order to catch them,” he says. “As an artist, I follow a similar method.”
Darrell 3D-prints each work to achieve the necessary level of precision. Every component needs to align perfectly to create such methodical, entrancing motions, powered by a single motor and a mix of gears, belts, magnets, cams, and elastic bands. Darrell shares:
I engage in kinaesthetic play with my prototypes, discovering new ways they can revolve and move together. I’m a self-taught engineer, and I always try to do something new that I haven’t seen before. Steadily, they get more complex over time, and sometimes something completely unexpected jumps out at me, bringing on a new wave of development.
The result is a diverse collection of sculptures that meld the form of botanicals with restless animal movements. Reactions “(vary) from viewer to viewer. For some, it’s a purely pleasurable experience, for others too stimulating and even perverse,” he shares.
Watch more of Darrell’s uncanny mechanics on Instagram.
“Optimism Bloom”
“Oneiros”
Detail of “Optimism Bloom”
“The Institute of Sex and Consumption”
“Ostara”
“Oneiros”
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Sara Schoenberger’s Louis Collection Will Make You Squirm in Delight
It was while searching for a wall-mounted swing light imagined to bring some additional illumination to a perpetually shaded corner that we came upon the smile-inducing wiggly forms of the Louis Collection by Sara Schoenberger. We soon realized Schoenberger’s design looked familiar, eventually remembering the designer was amongst the WantedDesign Manhattan’s Launch Pad Participants a year ago, thrilled to discover the designer had evolved the idea into something even more swinging.
The original 2022 iteration of the Louis light we first spied was designed as a table lamp, with an indented pattern ceramic mound base, but sharing the same basic wavy-curvy armed form.
Even without explanation, the light collection’s moniker and curvy shape clearly communicates its musically-inspired origins. The Louis Collection is indeed a nod to jazz great, Louis Armstrong, a musical icon from Schoenberger’s hometown of New Orleans.
Powder coated in bright colors, the lamps take on a graphic, playful, and almost cartoonish personality.
Taking cues from the curved aluminum forms of brass instruments, each light’s swing arm stretches that visual note into delightfully exaggerated crescendos and diminuendos before terminating in an integrated LED light.
The Small, Downlight edition is described as the “perfect bedside reading lamp,” while the Large, Uplight version is suited to produce an ambient mood-enhancing light that bounced light off the walls and ceilings. Each incorporates a wall-mounted swing arm attachment to permit 180 degrees of adjustable positioning.
Colors available include Red Brown, Gentian Blue, Blood Orange, Blackened Metal, and our favorite above, Emerald Green. Each light is made to order, so expect a lead time of 6-8 weeks.
Schoenberger’s Louis Collection is available in both large and a smaller edition, with the $950 Small measuring 5″x 10.5″ D x 15.7″ and outfitted with a dimmable 4 watt LED, and the $1050 Large measuring 2″ x 43″ H x 11″ with the same dimmable 4 watt LED.
