Los Angeles-based photographer Daniel Malikyar has documented quite a range of characters throughout his career — from Lil Yachty to little footballers in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. His latest series, however, may be one of the most peculiar. Located in California’s Central Valley, the Afghan-American photographer and co-founder of MGX CREATIVE travelled to meet a community of nuns who specialize in growing cannabis.

Weed and nuns are rarely, if ever, associated to one another, but it was a fitting title for Malikyar’s latest photo exploration. The self-ordained nuns are an activist group on a mission to heal the world through plant-based medicine. “The sisters have been trying to legalize their business for years,” Malikyar tells Hypeart, “but local lawmakers have made it difficult for them – so their operations are happening illegally, and they could be shut down at any time. When it comes to their products (only referred to as medicine) each step of the process is scheduled to the cycles of the moon, so my visit was timed to photograph both a planting and harvesting ceremony of their cannabis crop.”

Armed with shotguns and taking rips out of various smoking paraphernalia, the scenes Malikyar captured looks like something out of a movie. “As a photographer, I love connecting with people from all walks of life and capturing their spirit through photographs that tell a deeper story,” Malikyar added. “This series features a candid mixture of documentary-style scenes and impromptu portraits of moments that caught my eye.”

Malikyar has previously worked with a range of talent in the music industry, including overseeing DJ-producer Marshmello’s content strategy, as well as overseeing global campaigns for Google, PlayStation and Levi’s. While each of his previous projects were monumental in scale, it was on the road at dawn, en route to meet the Weed Nuns — a quirky story that he just decided to chase further — that gave the photographer “a feeling that I live for.”

In today’s world of social media and YouTube, it is easy to think every time a photographer goes out, they come back home with portfolio-ready images. If you begin to believe this, it can impact your own landscape photography. This video looks at the real truth behind landscape photography.

It can be pretty depressing to spend a morning or day out practicing landscape photography and come home with no great images to share, especially when it seems like everyone else around you is capturing fantastic photos on every single trip or outing they make. In this video, William Patino shows the ugly truth behind landscape photography.

We follow as Patino makes his way through challenging terrain with several slippery scrambles to get a possible waterfall composition. As we follow along, we learn he’s already hiked several miles in and is even further from any real civilization just to reach this location as he works through several compositions.

Patino returns to the office and talks through three of the compositions that he is just going to throw away. He explains what was wrong with them and why they aren’t portfolio-worthy, but more importantly, explains this is the truth of landscape photography. Sometimes, we go on an outing, expend significant effort, and still don’t come home with anything.

I appreciate Patino’s perspective that the process overall can still be enjoyable. More importantly, his advice to evaluate what he calls the four killers of an unsuccessful outing can help you still learn something and improve your skills in the long run.

“Ikigai”: the Japanese word for the purpose of one’s life. To National Geographic photographer and SeaLegacy founder Cristina Mittermeier, this is the intersection of what you love, what you are good at, what makes money and what the world needs. On Friday, May 10, Mittermeier spoke as part of UC Santa Barbara’s Arts and Lectures “Earth, Air, Fire, Water” series, sharing with audiences her experiences as a photographer and how they led to her life-long dedication to ocean conservation — her ikigai.

Ocean and environmental conversation is a pressing topic for today’s generation. Issues like climate change and rising sea levels have become part of daily conversations, and conservationists like Mittermeier are seeking to address them.

Mittermeier started her journey with what she calls a “traditional Mexican woman’s upbringing” in Mexico City. She came from a family with little interest in the environment, but found herself fascinated with the ocean from a young age. 

This fascination stayed with her, and Mittermeier went on to study at the Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico, gaining a degree in biochemical engineering in marine sciences. Although she had gone to school intending to learn more about how to protect the ocean, she later realized that she was actually learning “everything you need to know about how to extract enormous amounts of biomass from the ocean.” Mittermeier quickly realized this was not what she wanted to pursue, but she knew she had a desire to be involved in ocean conservation. Despite her scientific background, she decided to approach the issue through storytelling.

Not knowing where to start, she settled on borrowing a camera and began shooting. She attended Corcoran School of the Arts & Design’s fine art photography program, where she honed her skills. Over the course of her career, she has traveled to 133 countries as a photographer on assignment and her work has been featured in National Geographic, TIME Magazine, CNN and many other publications. Mittermeier’s goal is to build awareness of people’s responsibility to the environment, and our duty to protect it.

Mittermeier is adamant about the importance of storytelling in enacting change, particularly in ocean and environmental conservation. According to Mittermeier, “without stories, the ocean dies in silence,” arguing that “the right story can change everything.”

Telling the right story is just what Mittermeier has set out to do throughout her career. She described her first assignment photographing Indigenous peoples in Brazil who were going to be displaced due to the construction of the world’s fourth largest hydroelectric power plant, the Belo Monte Dam. Mittermeier hoped that her photographs would bring attention to these peoples, and perhaps halt the dam’s construction.

Mittermeier was unsuccessful and the dam was constructed. However, she said her job was “to tell the story of the mothers, the children, the families that were going to lose their homes.”

Mittermeier did exactly that, detailing the peoples’ connection to the Amazon. She described their tattoos made from semi-permanent ink, derived from the genipap fruit, which indicates their marital status, household and much more. Every two weeks this has to be reapplied, with children sitting for hours as their mothers paint them. Mittermeier even described the people’s desires to paint her, and her struggles in communicating with them about it.

According to Mittermeier, it was incredibly difficult to speak with the Indigenous people, even with a translator. But one term she did pick up was “maykonome,” a common greeting meaning “I see you.”

Mittemeier emphasized the significance of the word’s meaning, explaining that “your life depends on being seen by the rest of the community, on being accountable”.

It is this ideology and ingenuity of Indigenous peoples that Mittermeier believes we need to learn from in order to address current environmental and oceanic issues. She wishes to implement their techniques and approaches to problem solving for conservation.

Despite being highly successful and sought after, Mittermeier decided to leave her position as a professional photographer for National Geographic at the height of her career and founded the nonprofit SeaLegacy. SeaLegacy’s mission is to “inspire people to fall in love with the ocean, amplify a network of changemakers around the world, and catalyze hands-on diplomacy through hopeful, world-class visual storytelling.”

SeaLegacy aims to tell stories in the hopes of  saving the ocean and help the world meet the seven recovery wedges that comprise the UN Sustainable Development Goals. These recovery wedges are steps meant to restore the ocean’s health and ocean wildlife. They include protecting more of the ocean, preserving biodiversity, restoring degraded habitats, stemming the flow of ocean pollution, rethinking how food from the ocean is sourced, viewing the ocean as a solution to climate change and achieving ocean equity and justice for coastal communities.

Mittermeier believes that following these wedges would allow marine life to rebuild in a single generation. However, she says we have to do so ourselves, because “No one is coming to save us.”

To realize this, Mittermeier has been raising funds and working to protect the environment. For example, when the Canadian government refused to protect a subspecies of gray wolves specific to British Columbia from hunting, Mittermeir and a group of photographers took matters into their own hands. To protect them from being hunted, the group raised funds and bought all of the hunting licenses for these wolves.

Mittermeier emphasizes the importance of not only the work by conservationists and nonprofit organizations, but also efforts at an individual level. She describes Americans as “the most philanthropic people on planet Earth,” donating 480 billion dollars per year on average. Yet of this, only 1.8% goes to the environment, 0.25% to the ocean specifically. She urges people to donate more towards the environment, stating that “our lives depend on it.”

Mittermeier also described her newest crowdfunded project, “Hope”, a book featuring a collection of her work throughout her career. Proceeds will be donated to the communities photographed within the book. 

“Hope is a choice … the minute we lose the hope we have lost the fight,” Mittermeier said.

To close, Mittermeier emulated the beginning of her talk, and the accountability we owe each other. Mittermeier urged the audience to say, “I am accountable to you, I’m going to do everything in my power to keep our planet alive.” As, according to Mittermeier, “That’s what I’m doing the rest of my life … maykonome to all of you.”

Trailblazing photographer and travel enthusiast Billie Buchanan

A fiercely independent woman, it is assumed by Colin and his wife Sarah whom Olympics.com spoke to at their countryside house three months before Paris 2024 begins, that his mum’s passion for photography accelerated after her new husband, Laurie, left the country days after their wedding to work overseas as an oil industry engineer.

They didn’t see each other for a year.

Prior to the marriage Billie had worked as a photographer, firstly for weddings and then industrial, including photographing the testing of the prototype of the first commercial gas turbine engine, at an aircraft factory in North London.

Post-marriage, she didn’t work, as per the era, and also because the family regularly travelled overseas, “but she kept her camera with her all the time”, says Sarah.

This shared passion for travel meant the couple and their three children – Colin, his twin sister, and younger sister – lived in the Netherlands, Spain, then under General Franco’s rule, and Nigeria.

Cinefilm footage from the latter, filmed by Billie and found by Colin, reveals both domestic scenes and tribal customs in an era when overseas travel was unusual.

Billie’s adventurous, independent spirit likely emulated her mother’s, who was left to bring up her two children alone after her husband, Chris Duffield, a Thames riverboat fireman and amateur rower, died of peritonitis when Billie was six years old.

Fyffe – originally called Florence, which she hated, so changed her name after seeing a truck go past one day with Fyffes bananas written on the side – worked full-time, starting with washing floors in a canteen and eventually as a restaurant co-owner. At a time when women weren’t expected to work, Fyffe was ambitious for herself, and determined that her two girls would be educated properly, so homework was a priority.

On leaving school, Billie studied photography at college, but no one in the family knows from whom this passion stemmed. The fact that Billie was a photographer at the London 1948 Opening Ceremony was still a surprise for her children when they were looking through their mother’s effects after she died in July 2021.

Gareth McConnell’s new photo book brings together pictures from Britain’s biggest ever protest, juxtaposed with close-ups of cherry blossom

May 23, 2024