“Technological Mandala 201 – Circus Circus Circus!” (2023), electronic components, copper wires, varnish, enamel paint, 3D printed elements, lead, gesso, acrylic paint, epoxy resin, sand, gold leaf, speaker, stone, and MDF, 100 x 100 x 4.5 centimeters. All images © Leonardo Ulian, shared with permission
During the past several decades, digital technology has impacted—and in many cases completely transformed—just about everything. From medicine to sports to the supply chain, myriad facets of our lives are organized and determined by computers. For London-based artist Leonardo Ulian (previously), the networks and connections of today’s technologies provide an unending well of inspiration.
In a number of ongoing series like Technological Mandalas, Techno Atlas, or Contrived Objects, Ulian draws on varying themes like the body, global maps, and analog objects to create a dialogue between electronic systems, philosophy, and the human condition.
The Technological Mandala series, for example, came into being a little more than a decade ago when Ulian was going through a personal crisis and sought a sense of purpose in his life and artistic practice. His research and experiments at the time opened a trove of ideas that he continues to tap into. “After 10 years,” he says, “I am still captivated by the discoveries this body of work is helping me make, both in terms of novel concepts and, I would say, philosophical thoughts.”
Find more on Ulian’s website and Instagram.
Detail of “Contrived Object 31 – Mr Maxply” (2021), electronic components, varnish, copper wires, and tennis racket, 71.2 × 19.7 × 12 centimeters
“Technological Mandala 143 – Flowing Vitae” (2019), electronic components, copper wires, varnish, lead, paper, acrylic paint, mechanical parts, and MDF, 228.6 x 101.6 x 5.5 centimeters
“Techno Atlas 014 – Windmill of Drops” (2021), electronic components, microchip, speakers, copper wires, lead, 3D printed elements, varnish, paper, and wood, 84 x 84 x 4.5 centimeters
Left: “Physiognomy 05 – Novus Homo” (2023), electronic components, copper wires, varnish, lead, acrylic paint, sand, MDF, wood, gold perspex glass, and red perspex, 114 x 72 x 4 centimeters. Right: “Contrived Object 31 – Mr Maxply” (2021)
“Techno Atlas 013 – Rebirthing State” (2021), electronic components, microchip, speakers, copper wires, lead, 3D printed elements, varnish, paper, and wood, 84 x 84 x 4.5 centimeters
“Contrived Object 33 – Mr Zaman” (2021), electronic components, solder, varnish, copper wires, tennis racket, gold perspex mirror, chain, and lead, 71.5 × 19 × 12 centimeters
“Technological Mandala 159 – Ego Novi” (2022), electronic components, copper wires, copper foil, lead, solder, acrylic perspex mirror, colored perspex, enamel paint, varnish, and screws, 210 x 210 centimeters. Photo courtesy of THE FLAT – Massimo Carasi Art Gallery
“Technological Mandala 164 – Continuous Orbit” (2022), electronic components, microchip, speaker, copper wire, and wood frame, 84 x 84 x 4.5 centimeters
Detail of “Technological Mandala 164 – Continuous Orbit” (2022)
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If a camera company could make one lens, what would get your vote? It’s a question floated around on camera forums with all kinds of wild responses that put physics aside considering what is and isn’t possible. However, if rumors are true, Sony could soon announce the kind of lens that we’d put in the wishful thinking category – the world’s first 24-70mm f/2 full-frame lens. Mama mia.
Let’s be clear, this is a rumor, but it’s also possible. Canon wowed us with the first full-frame zoom lens with constant f/2 aperture, its RF 28-70mm F2 L USM pro lens. However, the rumored Sony lens is tipped to go wider while also offering a constant f/2 aperture, being 24-70mm, and becoming one of the best Sony lenses ever.
My one lens for wedding and event photography is a trusty 24-70mm f/2.8 (see below). It’s a classic pro lens that’s extremely versatile. However, there are plenty of occasions that I’d like a wider aperture, for instance; to gain a shallower depth of field portraits with the lens set somewhere between 50mm and 70mm, and for lowlight indoor spaces where events are often hosted. The rumored Sony lens – story courtesy of Sony Alpha Rumors – could be just the ticket.
A 24-70mm f/2 lens would do the job of several prime lenses, covering 24mm, 28mm, 35mm, 50mm, and 70mm, and could be the one lens you need, especially for landscape photography, portrait, events, and weddings. Sticking to a single lens rather than constantly swapping is a godsend for pressured photo and video jobs. However, such convenience will come at a cost in more ways than one.
If Canon’s cutting-edge 28-70mm f/2 lens is anything to go by, we can expect Sony’s lens to be hefty. It’ll surely be larger and heavier than the Sony FE 24-70mm F/2.8 GM II, which weighs 1.53lb / 695g. Rumors sensibly suggest it’ll have similar proportions to the gargantuan Canon RF 28-70mm which measures 4.08 x 5.5 in / 103.8 x 139.8mm and weighs a whopping 3.15lb / 1,430g. I’ve used that lens, and it is a beast.
We can also expect Sony’s rumored lens to cost more than the Sony FE 24-70mm F/2.8, and that one already retails for around $2,000 / £2,300. I’d expect a f/2 aperture version to go for at least $3,000 / £3,300. So it’ll be a heavier and pricier lens, but it’ll also be a pro ‘GM’ lens which means that image quality should be excellent throughout the entire zoom and aperture range.
I can see the appeal of such a lens because keeping a single lens attached to the camera all day during a shoot, even if it is heavier, is a dream for pros. And if the lens materializes, it’s the kind of design showboating that we love.
Editor’s Note: In honor of Women’s History Month, we’re sharing profiles of remarkable women in art we think you should know (if you don’t already).
Today, portrait photography is so common that anyone with a phone — and maybe a generative AI app — can take a highly stylized close-up in mere seconds.
But in the 19th century, when the medium of photography was still new (the first photo was taken in 1822) the term “portrait” to most people meant an actual painting of a person. Then came Julia Margaret Cameron.
Born in India in 1815, Cameron was very much a product of the British Empire. Her father worked for the East India Company, and she and her six sisters spent their childhoods in Calcutta before heading to France for education. Cameron met her future husband in South Africa in the 1830s and the pair, who had 11 children (including six who were adopted) lived in various colonial outposts. Julia Margaret Cameron was a very global woman.
Eventually, Cameron and her husband relocated to England and became the Victorian versions of empty nesters. And then, for her 48th birthday in 1863, one of her daughters gave her an extraordinary gift: a camera.
Cameron, like most people, had never taken a single photo — but she soon dedicated her time and creative energy to mastering this emerging art. Over the next 15 years, she took hundreds of portraits, most of which have been acquired by world-class museums. Quite an accomplishment for any artist, but particularly for one who entered the field later in life.
Her portraits of men and women have an ethereal, soft quality to them. The portraits are taken close up, which was an entirely new approach – so that the face of the subject with all its emotions is the center of the picture, as opposed to a distant shot of someone sitting stiffly in a chair. Cameron is recognized as the first photographer in history to take close-up portraits.
One of her most hauntingly beautiful portraits is of her niece Julia Jackson. The photo is dark; only half of Jackson’s face is in the light, and her hair floats outwards, filling up the sides of the frame. Jackson stares right into the camera, so that the viewer is confronted with a woman staring right back at them.
Part of what makes this photo so interesting is that Jackson would eventually give birth to a daughter who would become incredibly well-known in her own right: the writer Virginia Woolf.
Many years later, when Woolf wrote “To The Lighthouse” in 1927, she modeled her main character Mrs. Ramsay from this portrait of her mother, creating a kind of multigenerational line of inspiration from great aunt, to niece, to great niece that endures to this day. The portrait of Jackson now lives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, along with many other of Cameron’s photographs. ◼
In one image taken for Vogue, Song captures a women slicing through a watermelon in mid-air with a sword. For him, watermelon represents home. It’s the main export of FuLi, a tiny village in the HeiLongJiang province of northern China where he’s from. For as long as he can remember, his mom has worked in the watermelon market, dispatching the fruit across the country. At first, FuLi sounds idyllic; his childhood was spent playing MaJiang and jumping rope with the girls in his neighborhood. However, Song was bullied at school while simultaneously grappling with his queerness in a traditional environment. It wasn’t easy, but music TV became his escape. He spent hours entranced by Jolin Tsai, A-mei Chang, Karen Mok, Elva Hsiao and Ranie Yang, who all found liberation through their empowered feminine worlds.
Song didn’t have a conventional path into photography; his first encounter with the medium was during his advertising degree. He bought a camera, started making photographs of his friends, and has never looked back.
If you had to describe Scott Kelby’s career in one word, it would be prolific. He’s written over 100 books and is best known to many as the CEO of KelbyOne, one of the most comprehensive online training platforms for photography and image processing. And yet the qualities that stand out when speaking to Scott (or reading one of his books) are his warmth, humility, and sense of humor.
To illustrate all of these qualities, Scott will be appearing at The Photography & Video Show in Birmingham, UK next week from March 16-19, with not one but 5 talks and several book signing sessions. But he hasn’t always been taking photos, as I recently found out.
Meet the pro
Don’t miss Scott’s talks and book signing sessions at The Photography & Video Show, held at the NEC Birmingham between March 16-19, 2024. He’ll be there between 16-18, hosting talks such as ‘What makes a great travel photo?’ and joining a panel of experts discussing ‘Will AI be the death of us, or the saviour?’ Get your tickets here.
During his twenties, Scott was making a living by playing keyboards full-time in bands and clubs, or as he puts it, “mostly fulfilling the dream of being a starving musician”. After a brief stint in the finance industry, Scott quit to start a graphic design business with his wife. This led to him starting a local newspaper for Macintosh enthusiasts, which over time grew into a national magazine available on bookstands. That got him into writing and eventually a book publishing deal, and helped him launch his first live Photoshop seminar.
“I would sound a lot more intelligent if I said it was all carefully planned”, says Scott, who believes that a lot of his career was luck, a door opening when he least expected it, or one thing leading to another. It’s easy to be carried along by his optimism and energy, and it feels like he’s been making much of his luck all along. Here, we find out what he makes of AI photo editing, what the success of having the world’s best-selling photography book means, and what to expect from his talk for Canon at The Photography & Video Show 2024.
Scott Kelby is a photographer, designer, podcast host, and the award-winning author of more than 100 books, including The Digital Photography Book series and The iPhone Photography Book. He lives in the US in the Tampa Bay Area of Florida with his wife, daughter, and three “awesome doggos”.
Scott was also the president and founder of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP), which merged with Kelbytraining.com in 2008 to become KelbyOne, a huge online training platform for Adobe Photoshop, Photography, and Lightroom. He’s currently working on a new book called Crush The Composition that looks at photographic composition outside of the typical rules.
I’d never really thought much about photography growing up, but one day, my older brother came home with some 8×10 glossy prints from a trip he took to Europe, and I was just blown away. I couldn’t believe someone I knew could take photos like that, and it intrigued me. My brother saw my enthusiasm for it, and when he bought a new camera, he gave me his old one (a Minolta SRT 101 film camera). I was off and running.
It wasn’t long before a friend and I opened a small portrait studio, and I was shooting day and night non-stop. Shooting so much that I burned out on photography. I literally just stopped. I closed the studio, packed up my gear, and stored it all up in the attic, and I didn’t touch it for about 10 or 12 years. I was done with photography… until the day I held my first DSLR (a Nikon D1, back in 1999 or 2000). Seeing that image appear instantly on the back of the camera reignited my passion for photography, and I’ve been shooting, and loving it, ever since.
I think it was when I wrote my book, The Digital Photography Book (I know, kind of an obvious name), as that book took off and sold millions of copies. It’s translated into dozens of different languages. It’s the number one bestselling book on digital photography in history, and it set off my career as an author, speaker, and instructor. That was a real turning point for me.
Weird. This is something I’m sure a therapist or psychologist would have a field day with, but I work hard to write great books that I feel will help people – that will get results and make a significant difference in their enjoyment of photography. That leads to books that sell, sure, but then we receive awards or accolades, and I almost feel like it’s happening to someone else.
I’m very shy about it, and my publisher has to push me even to share the news because I don’t like to toot my own horn. I guess I just want to focus on the education and not the accolades or high sales numbers.
Oh my gosh, does it ever! It’s like a band releasing a hit album. How do you follow it up? There’s a lot of pressure to make the next one bigger and better, but I just try to keep my head down, do the right thing for the reader, and not get distracted by that pressure. It’s not easy to do because a lot of people are counting on you. Following up a smash bestseller is not for the faint at heart.
Although I shoot many different genres (because I teach them), my passion lies in travel photography, portraiture, and sports photography. Take travel photography, for example. I love to travel – love it! So, take something I love (photography) and join it with my love of travel, making the whole experience much more fun. Add my love of people and toss in the occasional stop at a local burger joint, and it makes you want to grab a camera and run to the airport.
I do, and I think AI is already starting to turn our world a little upside down in that regard. We see it a lot in our post-processing in Photoshop and Lightroom and a little in our cameras themselves (features like eye autofocus), but things seem to be moving rapidly. Things that used to be so tedious in post-production have gotten almost ridiculously easy.
That has lowered the bar to entry for professional-level editing, and I know that has upset some folks who learned how to do all this stuff “the hard way”. I get it, but it’s here, and complaining about it won’t make it go away. It’s time to embrace and enjoy it or watch it run over you. I saw this happen back in the transition from film to digital. It freaked many people out, but most eventually embraced it.
There is nothing like the energy you get from speaking to a live audience. It is just about the most fun thing I get to do. You know you have people in your life who, if they go to a great new restaurant, can’t wait to tell all their friends so they can try it out? That’s me.
If I learn something new, I can’t wait to share it, and when you’re on stage sharing these things, and you see the lightbulb go off in your audience’s head, and they are right there with you – it’s exhilarating. As an educator, it’s so much fun connecting with your audience and the energy and ideas that go back and forth.
This is my second time speaking at The Photography Show; my first experience was absolutely wonderful. I loved it! It is one of the best events of its kind anywhere – the crowds’ enthusiasm is infectious (probably not the best word to use these days), there are so many vendors and so much to see, and there’s learning around every cover. I’m just a big fan, and I can’t wait to get back this year, where I’m speaking about travel, Photoshop, Lightroom, and all sorts of fun stuff. I have a lot of new stuff to share, so I am super psyched.
I had been a Nikon user for many years – not because I did the research and carefully picked the right platform for me. It was because my brother gave me one of his hand-me-down Nikon cameras, so I was a Nikon guy from the start. But the first time I shot a pro football game with a Canon rig, that was it for me – I fell in love. Before long, I had switched entirely over to Canon.
I think your choice of camera is a very personal thing. This is the tool you use to make your art, and it has to connect with you. It has to feel right in your hands, and the menus have to make sense to you. You want to feel like you are working together to achieve a common goal – to create something beautiful, interesting, or fun, so it has to be a fit.
Nikon makes great cameras. Still, Canon speaks to me on an artistic level and a technical one as well. For example, I love the way Canon renders skin tone, and I don’t think any other camera matches it. Canon glass is also unbeatable.
My go-to body is my Canon EOS R6 Mark II, which does everything I want and more. I primarily use one lens for travel – the RF 24-240mm – but I also have the RF 14-35mm f/4 in case I shoot a classic interior shot. My go-to lenses for portraits are my EF 70-200mm f/2.8 and my RF 85mm f/1.2L. For sports, it’s my Canon EOS-1DX and my EF 400mm f/2.8 III.
I started using Photoshop in my day job as a graphic designer before photographers embraced it for their work. I started back on Photoshop 2.0, so I was black-and-white scanning, color conversions, and pre-press type stuff for years before it hit with photographers. When we did our first full-day Photoshop seminar back in 1993, there was nothing out there like it, and that propelled everything.
By 1999 we formed The National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP). Then, a few years later, we started an online training platform called Kelby Training. When Adobe launched its subscription model, a lot of people were upset. People started dropping their memberships, telling us they wouldn’t be “renting” their software, so they would no longer be using Photoshop, and thus, they would no longer need us to teach them. Ouch!
Sometimes, but the nice thing about running your own company is that you have a team behind you, so you can fairly often step away to do other things, like travel or shoot a game or an airshow, and everything doesn’t fall apart. I’ve got an amazing team at KelbyOne, with lots of support, and that frees me to have time to be creative and spend time with my family and friends.
It would be travel photography. I so love to travel, and I go light with my gear and still get the type of shots I want to. I can photograph people through my travel images, and I get to see incredible places, meet neat people, eat great food, and learn about different cultures. Plus, my family loves to travel with me, so we go on a lot of holidays together and that is the most fun for me.
If you want to go pro, you need to develop your signature look – one that’s repeatable for you again and again. The more unique it is to you, the more you’ll work. Today’s cameras are so good – heck, even our phones can take great photos – so if everybody today can take a pretty decent photo, why would anybody pay to hire you?
They will hire you if you have a unique look they can’t easily achieve on their own or from their “friend with a nice camera”. Chances are a lot of this “look” will come from what you do in post-processing, but it might also have to do with how you compose or see a scene. realistically, it’s probably mostly coming from your post-processing.
You’ll know you have a style or a look when friends or other photographers look at one of your images and say something like, “I knew that was one of yours.” That’s when you know you’re developing your signature look – when other people start to recognize your images as one of yours immediately.
I could pick a Joe McNally portrait from a stack of prints in two seconds. That’s what I’m talking about. The same goes for a Peter Hurley headshot. I can tell you if it’s one of Peter’s (or one of his students or protégés). That’s the first step – getting your look. Then, I would recommend putting the rest of your energy into getting good at marketing yourself or getting signed on with an agent to do it for you.
I feel like my best images are still inside me. I’m pretty consistently frustrated with my work because I know I can do better, and what’s next for me this year is setting aside some time to work on personal projects and shooting for my portfolio. I spent so much time creating images during an online course recording or during a live on-stage demo that I don’t often take the time to plan and set up a shoot just for me, so this year, I’m going to focus more on that.
Well, you didn’t ask me what special thing I did the last time I was in Birmingham for The Photography Show! We took my son and daughter to the castle near Stratford Upon Avon, where I proposed to my wife (their mother) 35 years ago. I took them to the spot where I got down on one knee and offered her an engagement ring (I’m glad she said yes, or it would have been quite awkward).
The kids got a kick out of seeing that spot and hearing the story all over again, but looking at the very castle and the lane and seeing the places they had only heard of in stories of how I asked the girl of my dreams to marry me so very long ago.
You can meet and greet Scott Kelby at The Photography Show & Video Show between 16-18 March, 2024. Find out more about his talks here.
