Photographer Revolutionizes Technique by Holding Lens Wrong Way,

Dec 11, 2023 By Admin in Photography

Los Angeles, CA: In a bold move defying decades of established practice, local photographer Max Carter has turned the photography world upside down—literally—by opting to hold his camera lens over the top, instead of the traditional support from underneath. This unconventional technique has sparked a mixture of outrage, confusion, and reluctant admiration within the photography community.

“I was just looking for a new perspective,” Carter explained, nonchalantly flipping his Canon EOS R5 over. “Everyone holds their lens from the bottom. I thought, ‘Why not be different?’ Plus, it’s a great forearm workout.”

Carter’s unusual grip was first noticed during a beach photoshoot. Fellow photographers, initially thinking he was correcting a lens error, soon realized it was intentional. The scene quickly erupted into a mixture of gasps, scoffs, and a few intrigued murmurs.

Renowned photographer Linda Evans, present at the scene, commented: “I’ve seen many trends come and go, but this is absurd. How can you possibly stabilize the shot? It’s like he’s trying to make a smoothie with his camera!”

Online photography forums have been buzzing with debates over Carter’s technique. Some traditionalists have called it a “reckless gimmick,” while a few avant-garde photographers have praised it as a “revolutionary approach challenging the norms.”

Carter’s Instagram post, showcasing a beach sunset with the caption “Upside Down, Right Side Up,” received a record number of comments. “Is this a new filter?” asked one confused follower. Another commented, “Innovative or insane? Hard to tell.”

Photography instructor Kevin Smith weighed in: “While it’s essential to explore new techniques, there’s a reason we support lenses from underneath—it’s about physics, balance, and reducing camera shake. But who knows, maybe Carter is onto something, or maybe he just likes living life on the edge, quite literally.”

Despite the controversy, Carter keeps his experimental spirit, vowing to shoot with the rear screen instead of the viewfinder at his next shoot. When Smith heard of this, all he could say was: “too far. It’s just disrespectful.”

In a recent development, a camera accessory company has hinted at designing a “Carter Grip” in honor of this unconventional method. Whether this will become a new trend or remain a quirky blip in photography history remains to be seen. Meanwhile, Carter continues to turn heads and lenses, one shot at a time.

Suspect returns controversial sculpture to Manhattan cathedral with note

Dec 11, 2023 By Admin in Sculpture

Officials with the cathedral say the sculpture represents Christ in the female form and is reflective of its mission to be a house of prayer for all people.

Perspective | Showing the true face of dementia through photography

Dec 11, 2023 By Admin in Photography

Helen Rimell’s mother was her rock, “a ray of light in a troubled world,” she says. In 2015, Rimell’s mother was diagnosed with early onset vascular dementia. That’s when Rimell, a documentary photographer based in Britain, started documenting her relationship with her mother.

“I began this project as a way of preserving her, of keeping who she was alive,” Rimell says. Her intimate photos, which portray all aspects of her mother’s life, are at times brutal and heartbreaking. “[There’s] no hiding from the horrors and indignities, the true face of dementia, the pain, heartbreak, fear, and all that is lost.”

Rimell’s work has received this year’s Bob & Diane Fund Award, a photographic award dedicated to work that increases the understanding of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. It was started by Gina Martin, who lost her mother to Alzheimer’s.

“Helen’s images of her mother and family made an immediate impact on us when looking at this year’s submissions for the Bob and Diane Fund grant,” says photographer Chip Somodevilla, who served on this year’s jury. “The images were intense and unblinking in their intimacy, all on top of their strong use of color and composition.”

The award comes with $5,000, which Rimell plans to use to produce a photo book that will include the “raw, vulnerable and emotional messages” she wrote to a loved one as she cared for her mother over the past few years. “It [has been] an incredibly difficult journey for us both, but one that I have chosen to take with her for as long as I can,” she said.

Dan Lam Blurs the Lines Between the Alluring and Grotesque in ‘Guttation’

Dec 11, 2023 By Admin in Art World News

“Replicate.” All images © Dan Lam, shared with permission

Guttation is a botanical process that occurs when fungi or plants like grasses and ferns secrete sap from their pores. Small droplets of dew will emerge and then hang from fronds or leaves to help relieve the specimen of too much liquid accumulating in its roots.

Dallas-based artist Dan Lam evokes this vital act in an upcoming solo show at Hashimoto Contemporary in New York. Guttation comprises more than 60 of Lam’s signature drippy sculptures that take a turn toward the grotesque in comparison to previous bodies of work. Titled with biological names like “Gall,” “Gland,” and “Stomata,” the technicolor pieces vacillate between the unequivocally synthetic materials—resin, polyurethane, foam, and acrylic—and their gurgling, oozing forms.

While small, clear droplets cover some of the sculptures, others feature more mottled surfaces that veer toward revulsion. Thick, translucent glaze cloaks speckled works like “Stomata” and “Bark,” capturing her fascination with nature’s bizarre, unruly qualities and the potentially strange results of evolution and survival.

Guttation runs from December 16 to January 6. Find more of Lam’s work on her site and Instagram.

a gloopy technicolor sculpture that appears to drip over a shelf

“Gall”

“Bulb”

“Stomata”

“Bark”

“Concentration”

“Fluid”

“Membrane”

“Pressure”

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Dan Lam Blurs the Lines Between the Alluring and Grotesque in ‘Guttation’ appeared first on Colossal.

“It’s not typical to use on-camera flash in landscape photography, but I’m increasingly drawn to it”

Dec 11, 2023 By Admin in Photography

About Benedict Brain

Benedict Brain with camera — (Image credit: Marcus Hawkins)

Benedict Brain is a UK-based photographer, journalist and artist. He is an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society and sits on the society’s Distinctions Advisory Panel. He is also a past editor of Digital Camera Magazine, and the author of You Will be Able to Take Great Photos by The End of This Book.

The magical red of dogwood twigs is one of the joys of the winter landscape for me. The bare skeletal structures of trees and plants in general appeal to my aesthetic sensibilities: I find their delicate shapes more interesting than the lush green foliage of summer. Perhaps this speaks to my state of mind. Who knows?

This patch of wild dogwood was captured on a route along the River Avon in Bath, near where I live. It’s a flood zone that is enduringly fascinating to me, and rich with photographic potential. It’s along a path that I run down regularly, so even when I’m without my camera, I delight in its ever-changing appearance and make photos in my mind’s eye.

On this particular day in early January, it was super-cold and, even in the late afternoon, the frost hadn’t melted away. I’d never seen it looking quite so exquisite so, as soon I was home from my run, I grabbed my kit and headed back out to shoot photos.

It was twilight by the time I got back to the location. I made some images with a tripod, but I wasn’t capturing the ‘magical’ vibe I was feeling, so I decided to ditch the tripod and use an on-camera flash on my medium-format Fujifilm GFX. Using manual exposure, I balanced the sky with flash, lighting the dogwood. Bingo! The flashgun light accentuated the red hues of the twigs and captured the glistening frost with a sparkle. The harmonious relationship between the colors of the twilight sky and the twigs seemed perfect to me.

It’s not typical to use on-camera flash in landscape photography, but I’m finding that I’m increasingly drawn to it. I’m seduced by the otherworldly rendering of the land and its features that the artificial light produces, and perhaps the maverick approach appeals to my inner rebel.

In a way, this image also reminds me of an underwater scene: the combination of the color palette and the sea fern-esque shape of the twigs echo a coral reef.

• Other articles in the Art of Seeing series

‘Enveloped By Clouds,’ A Solo Photography Exhibit By Barbara Savicky At Village Music – Town-Crier Newspaper

Dec 11, 2023 By Admin in Photography

From Dec. 14 through Dec. 28, Village Music in Wellington will present a solo photography exhibit entitled “Enveloped by Clouds” depicting the illustrious beauty of clouds with their majestic and billowing formations.

“Meet the Artist” on Thursday, Dec. 14 at 6:45 p.m., which will be followed by the Village Music Jazz Trio at 7:30 p.m.

Also on exhibit will be a selection from Savicky’s recent solo show at the Delray Beach Public Library entitled “Abstract Reflections and Sky & Water.”

“Abstract Reflections” exemplifies amazing images of light and shadow reflected by everyday objects. “Sky and Water” depicts images in nature from the beautiful northeast. Savicky’s work can also be viewed at photageart.com.

Savicky recently published two books: “Enveloped by Clouds: A Photographic Spiritual Journey” and “Abstract Reflections: A Modernist Perspective.” Both books catalog the photo exhibits and are available for purchase along with the photographic prints.

A Boynton Beach resident, Savicky received a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Queens College in New York and a PhD in clinical social work/social welfare at Adelphi University, a certificate in interior design from the Parsons School of Design, and most recently received a B.Msc in metaphysics. Over the course of her career in both public service and interior design, she continued in drawing, design, and now photography and painting.

Village Music is located at 10410 W. Forest Hill Blvd. in the Shoppes at Wellington Green near Barnes & Noble. For more info., contact Village Music at (561) 798-5334 or visit www.villagemusicwellington.com for reservations and information.

Film follows Vancouver Island carver’s journey to create signature piece

Dec 11, 2023 By Admin in Sculpture

Luke Marston documentary ‘Shore to Shore’ was screened at Chemainus Theatre last month

Bronze top hat missing from Abraham Lincoln statue in Kentucky

Dec 11, 2023 By Admin in Sculpture

Abraham Lincoln’s top hat is missing from a bronze sculpture along the Ohio River in Louisville, Kentucky

A Minimalist Lithuanian Townhouse With Subtle Pops of Pale Yellow

Dec 11, 2023 By Admin in Design

Located in Klaipeda, Lithuania, VVV is a minimalist townhouse renovation by Ieva Baranauskaite of i.B Archstudio, who worked with a compact floor plan of only 110 square meters (approx. 1184 square feet). The ethos of VVV revolves around the use of line and rhythm as the main design elements in the project’s overall scope. The townhouse posed a challenge – incorporating all essential functions while preserving a sense of spaciousness. The solution? A departure from traditional walls and the addition of a multifunctional, custom furniture piece ingeniously divides the space into distinct functional zones without closing it off.

This unit is a three-sided design, serving as the anchor for the entrance zone with a bench and wardrobe. It transitions into the kitchen area where tall cabinets offer extra storage, and culminates in the living space with a high table and bar.

The space remains mostly void of color, keeping surfaces and furnishings in white or soft shades of gray. The occasional use of pale yellow pops up on the lower kitchen cabinets and exterior staircase panel.

The main floor continues with a living room and dining area, featuring two bespoke wall cabinets that float above the ground. These objects, designed to provide essential storage, are more than mere utilitarian pieces – they are artful elements that enhance the open living space. Designed to match the color of the wall behind, they become integral components of the room, playing with composition, geometry, and shadows that create an interactive and visually engaging environment.

The floor above, which houses three bedrooms and a bathroom, maintains its commitment to uniformity, eschewing strong contrasts, textures, and materials. Instead, the focus shifts to meticulous detail refinement and the strategic use of warm shades of light gray, complemented by pale yellow and orange. The result is a living space that breathes freshness into the residence, offering a tranquil place to retreat in the evenings.

Photography by Norbert Tukaj.

Caroline Williamson is Editor-in-Chief of Design Milk. She has a BFA in photography from SCAD and can usually be found searching for vintage wares, doing New York Times crossword puzzles in pen, or reworking playlists on Spotify.

Months alone and a 50-kilo pack: The Murray Fredericks guide to photography

Dec 11, 2023 By Admin in Photography

There’s landscape, and then there’s a Murray Fredericks landscape – and the story of how he got there is on display in a major retrospective.

Murray Fredericks in front of one of his earliest landscapes, shot in Ladakh.Credit: Jo Armao

In a room of the Museum of Australian Photography that’s adorned with large-format prints of his work, Murray Fredericks is being accosted by an endless stream of admirers, all eager to tell him how much his abstract landscapes speak to them.

“I’m not necessarily comfortable being the focus of attention,” he tells me. “It’s a bit out of place for a landscape photographer, I can tell you.”

Fredericks is a tall, fit, ruggedly handsome 53-year-old, somewhere between adventurer and, in this space at least, rock star.

The fans have come for the opening of the largest retrospective of his work yet. But while it’s called The Salt Lake in reference to the abstract landscapes created over 33 visits to Lake Eyre over the past 20-odd years, the exhibition also includes a bunch of images that are striking for how little they resemble the pictures that have made him one of the country’s most acclaimed artists.

These are far more traditional prints of mountain ranges, many in black and white, captured in Ladakh and Patagonia and south-west Tasmania at the start of the career he embarked upon in his late 20s after graduating with a degree in politics and economics.

“That was really the formative work,” he says. “I wasn’t trying to push the bounds of landscape photography, I was trying to master what I thought landscape photography was – technically, aesthetically, compositionally, setting up my way of working.”

To capture the shots of the Arthur Range in south-western Tasmania, he hiked in with all his food, his tent and sleeping gear, and a bellows camera. “The starting weight of my pack when I headed off was around 43 or 44 kilos,” he says. “The heaviest I ever went in with was 50 kilos.”

It was, he says, “overly ambitious”. “I only recall taking one of those black and white shots, and I can remember almost every shot I’ve ever taken. But because I was trying to bushwalk – as in get from A to B in a certain time – and to photograph at the same time, that didn’t work. That’s pure exhaustion.”

What those early forays taught him was the value of preparation and patience, which now informs every aspect of his practice.

“I’m hauling equipment up to a point, and then I’m going to rest, and I’m going to sit there until something happens,” he says. Typically, he’ll give it three days. But once he’s invested that much time, it’s tempting to stretch to four or five. “Some of the most pleasurable moments in my life are sitting in locations just waiting for the weather to clear, because it’s just a pure break. There’s no demands on you.”

Taking the black and white Tasmanian shots out of storage 20 years after he last looked at them was “really lovely”, he says, and has prompted his next project. In January, he will head back to Tasmania for what he hopes will be the first of three long hikes into the wilderness over three months. “I’m going in with two of my four boys, Jackson and Finn, age 21 and 17. I’m not sure if they know they have volunteered to help me with the weight, but they have.”

The challenge he has set for himself is to re-engage with a landscape that was such a formative influence on his craft, but this time through the lens (so to speak) of everything he has learnt in the decades since.

“They are very literal shots,” he says of those early pictures. “So I’m going in knowing that’s what I can’t do.

“The challenge is that it’s what I call a very traditional landscape, the landscape almost tells you what you can do there.”

But he’ll be doing his best to resist that diktat, using some “new chromatic technology that turns any vegetation almost white”.

Fredericks says the landscape “is just a tool to create an emotional response in the viewer”.Credit: Joe Armao

Whether desert or mountain, his aim is the same. “I’m obsessed with the nature of our medium, and the nature of photography is that the viewer assumes that it is true,” he says.

But his interventions in the landscape – whether through time lapse, the blurring of horizon and sky, the use of mirrors or, in his recent Blaze series, the introduction of fire (in a controlled way, he hastens to add, that leaves the landscape unharmed) – are all about playing with the boundary between fact and fiction, in service of a greater truth.

“I don’t believe what I’m doing at Lake Eyre is documenting the lake, the geographical nature,” he says. “What I’m trying to do is to convey the emotional quality of my experience, and I’m trying to tap into something universal.”

Everyone responds to images that convey a sense of the infinite, he believes, or to fire. “It might not be the identical response, but I’m pretty sure these things are evolutionary.”

The landscape is his medium; the human response to it is his real subject.

“It’s not a record of the landscape,” he insists. “The landscape is just a tool to create an emotional response in the viewer.”

Murray Fredericks: The Salt Lake is at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne, until February 18, 2024. Murray Fredericks: Blaze is at Arc One, 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne, until February 3.

Contact the author at kquinn@theage.com.au, follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin, and read more of his work here.