The Pinelands Preservation Alliance is calling all photographers.

The 2024 Pinelands Juried Photo Exhibit is open for submissions from all ages until Wednesday, Jan. 31. Six images per photographer are eligible.

The goal of the exhibit – which begins in March – is to celebrate the New Jersey Pinelands, the nation’s first national reserve, with photographs that capture its natural beauty and rich cultural heritage, according to the alliance. Congress created the Pinelands National Reserve (PNR) with passage of the National Parks and Recreation act of 1978, according to the state Pinelands Commission.

The PNR encompasses about 1.1 million acres of public and private lands spanning portions of seven counties and all or part of 56 municipalities. The reserve occupies 22% of the state’s land area and it is the largest body of open space on the Mid-Atlantic seaboard between Richmond and Boston.

PNR’s public lands include parks, forests, wildlife refuges and military bases. Private lands include 56 com­munities that range in size from small villages to large towns. Nearly 500,000 permanent residents live there.

Photographer and New Jersey native Patricia S. Worley’s “Morning Mist” won first place in the landscape category during last year’s Pinelands photo exhibit; it also graces the cover of the alliance’s promotional material.

Other exhibition winners in 2023 included John Dolph’s “Oswego Choices,” first place in the People, Places and Other category; Michele Martello’s “Sunrise at the Preserve,” honorable mention in landscape; Robert Fergurson II’s “Ratsnake at Night,” second place in flora and fauna; and Emma Tager’s “Enchanted Forest,” honorable mention in landscape.

Black-and-white and color images taken within the boundaries of the PNR and in the following categories will be accepted this year: Landscape, Flora and Fauna and Other (people, towns, architecture, culture, history and recreation). All eligible photographs submitted will be displayed in a special online New Jersey Pinelands gallery that will open on April 13.

Photo exhibit dates are March 25 through April 27 at the Pinelands headquarters, 17 Pemberton Road in Southampton. An opening reception will be held from 2 to 4 p.m. on Saturday, March 23, when awards will be announced.

The Pinelands Preservation Alliance reserves the right to disqualify any image that doesn’t meet contest rules or has subject matter not within the Pinelands. Images generated by the use of artificial intelligence (AI) text prompts are prohibited, but AI tools – Topaz, for example – may be used to enhance a photographer’s own images.

Award-winning professional photographer Henry Rowan is this year’s exhibit judge. He is also an author and the executive director of the Pennsylvania Center for Photography (PCP) in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, according to the Alliance, and teaches workshops there.

For more information and to view a map of the preserve, visit PinelandsPhotoExhibit.org.

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Zoom Anyplace uses AI technology to automatically track subjects during close-ups. And Samsung wants to create “Humanoid Sensors” that can copy human senses. The company reportedly has a roadmap that leads to the creation of AI image sensors that can capture invisible things by 2027. With 54% of the global image sensor market last year, according to Counterpoint Research, Sony is the company that uneasily wears the crown in the industry. Samsung was next with 29% and SK Hynix has slipped into the top five with 5%.

At its SK Hynix TechSummit 2023 event held last month, the Korean chip designer revealed that it has been embedding an image sensor onto an AI chip allowing it to process data at the sensor level. Traditional sensors have to send image information to the device’s CPU for computational processing. “On-sensor AI” is expected to improve image quality, reduce processing time, and lower energy consumption.

The image sensor market, which contracted during the pandemic due to a decline in smartphone sales, is now riding a new growth wave with demand coming from mobile devices, mixed reality headsets and other extended reality products, self-driving vehicles, and robots. Samsung is hoping that the image sensors it embeds with AI end up being used to back the mobile cameras found on its smartphones.

In the dynamic world of commercial photography, staying current and adaptable is crucial for success, especially in 2024. The industry has undergone significant changes since 2020, evolving rapidly and becoming almost unrecognizable. This video delves into the essential strategies that commercial photographers must adopt to stay relevant and avoid being left behind in this fast-paced environment.

Coming to you from Scott Choucino of Tin House Studio, this excellent video discusses commercial photography strategies for 2024. A key point highlighted in the video is the rising influence of AI in photography. Choucino reassures viewers that AI is not poised to replace traditional photography soon, much like how digital photography didn’t eliminate film. There’s a clear emphasis on the growing demand for diverse content due to the constant need to feed social media platforms. This shift has broadened the scope of work for photographers, from traditional billboard campaigns to creating daily content for platforms like Instagram and TikTok. The video stresses the importance of understanding and engaging with these platforms, even if they don’t align with one’s personal preferences. Knowing how to compose images that work across various aspect ratios is now a critical skill.

Furthermore, the video touches on the changing trends in image quality and aesthetics. There’s a move towards more natural, less polished content, which aligns with the current cultural zeitgeist. This trend suggests that photographers might not need to invest in higher-resolution cameras, as the market is shifting towards a preference for lower-resolution, more authentic imagery. The video also discusses the intersection of photography and video, encouraging photographers to explore video content creation as an additional creative outlet, without necessarily replacing their focus on still imagery.

The final takeaway from the video is about managing business overheads effectively. Emphasizing the profit-first system, Choucino advises photographers to keep their expenses well within their means, avoiding debt and maintaining financial stability. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Choucino! 

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Just as many staid adults were once rebellious teenagers in interesting clothing, many marine fish species enter life as flamboyant larvae that bear little resemblance to their mature forms. The juvenile scalloped ribbonfish pictured here, for example, eventually loses its flowing fin rays and grows into a teardrop-shaped adult that can reach over a meter long.

Or take the ribbon sawtail fish, which begins life with charmingly dopey eye stalks a quarter of the length of its body, and later becomes a svelte-eyed monster with an underbite full of snaggled needle teeth. Still others have guts that dangle like a second tail or offer dazzling color displays that they shed with time.

The differences between larvae and adults can be so significant that, through the 19th and 20th centuries, many larvae were misclassified as separate species or genera from the adults they would become. Scientists believe that these body changes have to do with diverging evolutionary pressures on larvae and adults.

The food-rich zone near the ocean’s surface is, after all, a very dangerous place to be tiny. The scalloped ribbonfish’s resemblance to a jellyfish with a nasty sting may be an effective deterrent to potential predators. And the ribbon sawtail fish’s eyestalks may do double duty by both easing its own efforts to find prey, and allowing it to search the water with minimal body movement that could attract creatures hoping to gulp it down.

Larval marine fish and invertebrates across the globe also participate en masse in defensive vertical migration. During the day, they descend to deeper water to avoid predators that hunt by eyesight. But by night, under cover of darkness, they rise to the surface to feed. The U.S. Navy first discovered this phenomenon in the ocean during World War II, when pings from sonar revealed a deep layer of interference that disappeared at night, like some kind of phantom web.

The ocean’s surface is a very dangerous place to be tiny.

But some knowledge of larvae’s morphological adaptations is more current. The cone-shaped trawl nets that scientists have long used to collect zooplankton, including larval fish, can mangle and break off the creatures’ ostentatious parts. And the fixatives used to preserve specimens drain their color. Recently though, the emerging practice of blackwater photography has brought these animals into clearer focus. Blackwater divers enter the water in the dead of night with bright lights and macro lenses. The resulting images of tiny creatures going about their lives in full color reveal much more about their bodies and behaviors than do their bleached, partial corpses.

Hitchhiking, for example, is ubiquitous. Magnus Lundgren, the Swedish underwater photographer who captured this scalloped ribbonfish, has also photographed nautiluses riding atop jellyfish and fish swimming among their tentacles, as well as fish and octopuses traveling inside or atop floating tunicates. What these creatures accomplish by sticking together isn’t clear. But perhaps with enough teamwork of their own, scientists and blackwater divers will illuminate answers as spectacular as the creatures themselves.

Magnus Lundgren is a decades-long, Swedish-born professional photographer who has been taking images for as long as he can remember. He is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading underwater photographers and is honored to work in the field of conservation photography. For him, conservation is the ultimate motivation. 

This story originally appeared in bioGraphic, an independent magazine about nature and regeneration powered by the California Academy of Sciences.

• Sarah Gilman

  Posted on December 29, 2023

  Sarah Gilman is a writer, illustrator, and editor who covers the environment, science, and place from rural Washington state. She’s also a contributing editor at Hakai Magazine. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Audubon, Smithsonian, High Country News, National Geographic, and others.

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