TAOS — Photographer Raul Velderrain spent two months planning the perfect shot: He would spend two hours climbing to a spot in the Rio Grande Gorge and then 20 seconds with an open shutter to capture the Milky Way as it loomed behind the gorge bridge.
What he didn’t plan to do was spend 28 hours in jail on a count of trespassing.
“It was worth it,” Velderrain told The Taos News, “because I got to see my vision and my art come to fruition.”
One of the biggest challenges of landscape photography is having the camera see what your eyes do. Our eyes are much more sensitive to certain changes in light than cameras. We see subtle variations in tone that the camera just doesn’t pick up.
This means environments can appear a little more drab than we’d hoped. In this video, Mark Denney walks us through how we can get some of that atmosphere back. It’s a great technique, and you don’t even have to leave Lightroom.
We’ve all been somewhere before where everything just seemed to come together. The light, the shadows, the clouds, the separation of depth from the haze. We bring up our camera to get a shot and it just completely loses the haze.
Trying to bring that back in the edit can be a challenge. It used to be extremely difficult to do in the early days of digital photography. Photoshop was kind of primitive, and Lightroom didn’t even exist yet. Aside from the lack of tools, the biggest issue back then was that the same techniques didn’t always work on all images.
That is still true today, as Mark mentions early on in the video. Every scene is different, and every scene is lit differently. So, he shows several different techniques for adding a hazy atmosphere back into your photos. And being done in Lightroom, the edits are completely non-destructive.
On a side note, I do find it quite amusing to see tutorials like this while also seeing tutorials about reducing the haze and how to make your colours pop.
On a sunny evening at the Governor’s mansion in Santa Fe, Paloma Rivera from the Pueblo of Pojoaque danced for a crowd of people in fabulous outfits of silk and leather, feathers and rhinestones.
Designers, models and fashion-lovers gathered to launch the first Native Fashion Week, the organizers say the first of its kind in the United States.
“Why Native Fashion Week? Because the time is way overdue!” said organizer Amber-Dawn Bear Robe (Siksika Nation), an art historian and curator, to cheers.
She said the fashion industry has long profited from Indigenous designs, but now it is time for Native designers to take the lead.
Alice Fordham
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“Indigenous designers and artists are the original fashion makers of this land,” Bear Robe said in an interview. “It just hasn’t been framed as that, it’s been framed as a curiosity or anthropological object.”
The Southwestern Association for Indian Arts, which also runs Santa Fe’s Indian Market, is organizing the week’s events.
“To see the amount of attention and love given to our communities right now is heartwarming and long overdue,” said SWAIA executive director Jamie Schulze (Northern Cheyenne/Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate).
As more people appreciate Native art and Native history, Bear Robe said there is more interest in designers like the ones who will be participating in a symposium at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture on Friday, May 3 and in runway shows at the Convention Center over the weekend. Tickets are available through the SWAIA website.
Other events during the week include a fundraiser at SITE Santa Fe at 6.30pm on May 4, including art, dance, sound and fashion. The money raised will go to support Indigenous artists through the 4KINSHIP Indigenous Futures Fund.
Despite all the growing attention and appreciation, Bear Robe said raising funding and sponsorship for an event like this is still very challenging.
“There is no shortage of Indigenous designers, of talent, of models, of the people who are interested,” she said. “But I need a Native Oprah.”
That is, someone with the resources as well as the will to champion Native creatives.
That challenge won’t go away soon, but this is a night of celebration. Participating designer Himikalas Pamela Baker (Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw/Tlingit/Haida/Squamish) called the fashion week a great recognition of Indigenous art.
Alice Fordham
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KUNM
“Every piece tells a story,” she said. “I think every designer you talk to, their pieces all tell a story of their history.”
Model Richard Smallboy (Maskwacis Cree Nation) said art and Indigeneity are intertwined.
“I think that inherently as Indigenous people, we express ourselves in a creative and artistic way and that this has always been a part of who we are,” he said.
He finds it natural for that art to modernize and change.
“The adaptive nature of how we are celebrating our fashion and our art is something that we have genetically within our blood, within our nations, within our practices, within our culture,” he said.
The West Nebraska Arts Center is hosting an exhibit highlighting the work of Native American artists and a second exhibit highlighting students during the month of May.
An opening reception for Continuing the Tradition III: A Celebration of Native American Art by Native American artists of South Dakota and Nebraska will be held Saturday, May 4, 2 to 4 p.m. The exhibit is made possible due to the support of the Nebraska Arts Council, the Nebraska Cultural Endowment, Blue Creek Traders, and Prairie Edge: Trading Co. & Galleries, according to a press release.
Featured art includes ledger art, handcrafted jewelry, bead work on authentic leather, pastels and more. The artists featured this time include Roger Broer, Dustin and Angela Twiss, Donald Montileaux, Susan Christancy and Sandy Swallow. The center will also have a presentation from Dustin and Angela Twiss.
Executive director Michele Denton said, “We are extremely thrilled to be having this show again. It is an awesome way to bring culture and celebration into the Arts Center. It is a great display of traditional and contemporary Native American art. This talent is breathtaking.”
This gallery exhibition and reception is free and open to the public and will be on display May 2 – 26.
The center is also presenting original art from Western Nebraska Community College students in its Bronson Gallery.
“This show is a treat for us. We enjoy the different mediums and the interesting ways the mediums are molded into unique designs.” Program Manager Stephanie Coley said in a press release.
The opening reception for the student exhibit will be also be held on May 4, planned for 5-7 p.m. The exhibit will be on display through June 25.
The West Nebraska Arts Center gallery is open Tuesday — Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m. Gallery admission is free and open to the public.
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CAIRO — Nine-year-old budding astronomer Seth Lynch traveled to Williford, Arkansas, to view the solar eclipse with his dad Jonathan, mom Kendra, and siblings Hannah, Caleb, and Sarah, plus grandmother, uncles, aunts, and cousins: eighteen in all.
Lynch and astronomer Randy Rhea met when he attended a partial eclipse viewing last October at the Pebble Hill Learning Center, and have been in contact since then. Santa brought Lynch a Celestron NexStar 130SLT telescope, and Lynch has been honing his astrophotography skills. He took this photograph of the eclipse at totality while mom followed his instructions on how to track the Sun with the hand controller. Lynch’s mom wrote Rhea: “Seth got after me when I was getting behind. Words, and even pictures, cannot do justice to the beauty and majesty of the experience. The eclipse even tricked the streetlights during totality. One scientist came all the way from Taiwan to view totality.”
BEHIND THE TELESCOPE: Seth Lynch at his telescope during the eclipse.
Notice the “cloud” around the Sun in Lynch’s photograph. At totality, the Moon covers the entire bright surface of the Sun, and the Sun’s atmosphere (corona) becomes visible. The Sun’s corona is actually much hotter than the solar surface, which is why the corona is white (white hot) rather than yellow. However, the corona is tenuous and therefore dimmer than the Sun’s surface. Coronal material is ejected by the Sun and travels millions of miles into space as it dissipates into the solar wind. It is this solar wind that pushes a comet’s tail away from the Sun. Seth’s photograph also reveals the filamentary nature of the corona.
Photographs of the total eclipse taken with cell phones show the corona. However, Lynch’s photograph also shows solar prominences. Solar prominences are large loops of plasma (atoms and electrons stripped of their bond). Prominences are anchored to the surface but loop around strong magnetic fields, rising hundreds of thousands of miles from the Sun.
Prominences rise above sunspots. Lynch’s photograph of the eclipse before totality shows sunspots. During periods of heavy solar activity, if you have keen eyes, you can see sunspots using only the safety glasses you used for the eclipse. Sunspots appear as very small speckles of black on the Sun. A telescope with a solar filter reveals larger spots in more detail, often in groups.
Before the eclipse, Rhea saw a headline “Your map of the path of totality is wrong, experts say.” This type of half-truth news prevails in media’s click-grabbing coverage of science today. The Sun is a ball of seething gas, so its exact “surface” is somewhat variable. This results in an uncertainty of a few seconds in the length of totality. Turn that idea into the “path is wrong” and media gets more clicks.
Where can you get accurate coverage of astronomy. Right here in the Times-Enterprise, of course. Or ask Lynch.
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