A photographer’s beautiful timelapse showing the onset of winter took him five years to shoot.

Jamie Scott shot Winter in upstate New York and Montreal, Canada. He employed drone shots to capture snowfall over large-scale areas; footage that was sometimes filmed years apart but cleverly edited to look consistent.

The project threw up many difficulties: Scott would see interesting things he wanted to shoot but it would be after the action occurred.

“For example, frost on windows, frost on cobwebs, and frozen waterfalls can create beautiful crystal-like formations, but they typically never happened twice in a row, which I needed to be able to plan the shot,” he explains.

Macro shots of leaves with frost were also a challenge because Scott had to focus for something that had not yet appeared, but he began to learn how certain objects freeze over.

“These elements can form in a matter of a few seconds to a few minutes,” he says.

“I learned that a large waterfall will slowly start to freeze over a number of weeks but the minute it turns to solid ice might happen within a few minutes.

“A lot of the best elements also happen in the middle of the night when it’s also the coldest outside. Needless to say, all of this combined created challenging conditions to get everything just right.”

The project meant Scott had to expose his camera equipment to the freezing temperatures, forcing him to take precautions.

“I had to keep the equipment dry and somewhat warm so it wouldn’t power off. In the snow I used plastic rain covers to keep the cameras dry. To keep snow off the lenses I used large fabric lens hoods,” he says.

“Cold weather drains batteries quickly, so I also strapped hand warmers to the equipment. In addition to the internal camera batteries, I also used external batteries to extend the life of the cameras.

“Sliders were also used for a lot of the shots so they all also needed the same treatment as the cameras. Unfortunately, I lost a lot of my external batteries over the course of the shoot as they eventually stopped working after being exposed to the cold for too long.”

The grueling timelapse meant leaving his cameras for “days and weeks” at a time. Scott and his partner made two weatherproof boxes to house the outdoor cameras complete with access panels at the back and a lens at the front.

“I also used additional light sources for lighting the shots at night. Although I could never simulate daylight they provided enough brightness to be able to expose correctly,” he adds.

Scott has a background in visual effects which he put to use in the editing process to give the film cohesiveness.

“Many of the shots were shot over several days so I had to even out the exposures and in some cases I had to transition from one day to the next,” he says.

Winter is set to a song by the composer Jim Perkins who collaborated with Scott and adapted the music as the film was created.

“Once we had established a basic structure to the piece we then built around that framework,” explains Perkins.

“The music has about 40 seconds of introduction before the violin arpeggio appears, which drives the piece forward. The piece then gradually builds, layering in new musical elements and taking away others to support the development of the visuals.

“As new musical elements were added, there was a lot of discussion around what worked and what didn’t, and all the decisions made helped bind the music and film together.”

The pair previously collaborated for another timelapse video entitled Spring.

More of Scott’s work can be found on his Instagram and website.

The new issue of Digital Photographer is out now!

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This month we have another amazing issue for you, featuring professional tips, reviews, and practical how-to guides. Here’s a sneak peek of what’s inside!

Landscape framing

Elevate your landscape photography skills and create inspiring, narrative images with these essential composition techniques.

With some lateral thinking and expert guidance from our editor, Peter Fenech, you’ll learn how to compose for different landscape styles, from busy scenes to minimalist landscapes, and use elements like water to add balance and energy to your frames. In our 10-page special you’ll also discover how to create contrast and adjust your framing to capture the direction and intensity of light at different times of the day.

Capture cool creatures

If you want to take some cool snaps of winter wildlife but don’t want to break the bank, our Technique Editor, Kim Bunermann, has got you covered. From page 36, she gives you a crash course on what you need to capture winter creatures without spending a fortune. 

With pictures by Reed Miller, who is no stranger to the pages of Digital Photographer magazine, she explains how to get started and why you should blend into nature to increase your chances of capturing natural behavior of wild animals. Reed also offers some tips and advice for capturing creatures big and small when out in the cold.

Interview with an AI explorer

Nancy Poeran, a Dutch artist, uses AI to create work that challenges our perception of reality. As a photographer with a unique viewpoint, she sees AI tools as an opportunity to produce abstract art. In our interview on page 76, Nancy explains how she embraces this controversial technology and believes that it has much to offer to the world of photography.

Shoot super sunsets

Whether you’re shooting in a remote location or a bustling city, the beauty of sunset is always within reach. Let us show you how to balance exposure and colour to create a powerful and captivating sunset atmosphere that will leave a lasting impression. Learn the essential steps to capture this beautiful light at the end of the day from p50. 

City location photoshoots

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Essential exposure technique: settings for seamless backgrounds

Photo therapy: the art of patience – why it’s worth waiting!

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Perkins Center for the Arts’ annual photography exhibition will be held at its Moorestown location from Wednesday, Jan. 10, through Friday, Feb. 23.

Artists can submit a maximum of three works that support the theme of “Photography 43” – point of view – and were created in the past three years. Work must be submitted on Perkins’ website under the exhibitions tab or by using a link on its Facebook page.

All entries must be framed and wired on the back, and Perkins recommends following professional standards, with glass or framing wire only. Works printed on canvas will also be accepted. The following will not: two pieces of glass or plexiglass joined by clips, plastic frames with cord that serves as a hanging mechanism (like poster frames) and alligator clips.

Entries must be delivered for the exhibit’s juror on Friday, Jan. 5, from 10 am to 2 p.m., or Saturday, Jan. 6, from noon to 4 p.m.

“The reason I chose that theme was to give every photographer participating an opportunity to give their point of view of course, and not have a theme that is obvious,” explained Sharon Kiefer, Perkins’ curator of exhibitions. “This is a theme that can be interpreted by each photographer individually, so we should get some really good entries for this.”

Perkins values the arts as essential to the social and emotional well-being of individuals and their communities and the arts as a safe platform for personal expression, according to its website, and for “Photography 43,” Kiefer’s thinking is that anything goes.

“It could be a point of view from an insect on the sidewalk or someone’s political view …” she said. “I mean it could be a lot of very broad subject matter covered in this exhibition. Photography is a medium that can be interpreted in many ways and can be very, very creative, depending on the photographer, so sometimes a piece of photography will be submitted, and you may not even realize that it’s a piece of photography. It may look like a painting.

“Or there may be some interpretation that uses the medium in a way that has never been used before, say with color or with black and white or with the subject matter …” Kiefer added. “The sky’s the limit in terms of how creative the photographers can be.”

This year’s juror is artist Liz Wuillermin, who’s recognized for her work in editorial, public relations, portraiture and corporate photography, according to her website. An artist’s reception will be held at the gallery on Saturday, Jan. 20, at 5 p.m., followed by an awards ceremony at 6:30 p.m. Prizes will total $650.

“It’s really interesting to actually get to speak with the artists at the reception and hear the back story about each piece, because you may take it for face value, but really, to them, it’s much more meaningful,” Kiefer observed.

“What I usually look forward to is the number of artists that are given opportunities to enter through the open-call aspect of the show and how many actually do enter,” she added. “And the beautiful work that the juror gets to curate the exhibition from.”

For more information on “Photography 43,” visit Perkins’ website or its social media pages.

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Posted: 22nd December, 2023 by The Editor

The year is 2013 and Canadian screamo/post-hardcore band, Silverstein has dropped their seventh studio album This Is How The Wind Shifts. 10 years later, the fellas are still going at it and celebrated the release of the album by doing a 10-year anniversary tour.

Silverstein took a different approach when performing This Is How The Wind Shifts in its entirety. Instead of playing the album from front to back, the band mixed it up and performed the songs out of order sprinkling in fan favorites and hits from their other albums. Fans in attendance also got to participate in a live set list vote.

Silverstein is one of those bands that when they cover a song, they find a way to deliver and apply a touch of their sound that won’t make people stop listening to the cover. They did just that with Linkin Park’s “One Step Closer”. Everyone around me either sang, jumped, or had their phones out. None of that would stop as the band proceeded to play fan favorite, “My Heroine” off Discovering The Waterfront. If you’ve seen Silverstein before, then you already know this is a song they play every time and it’s one that anyone who’s anyone is going to sing along to. Unfortunately, “My Heroine” would be the last song before the encore. 

There were still some songs from This Is How The Wind Shifts that the band had not played yet. For the encore, Silverstein played “Stand Amid the Roar”, “In a Place of Solace”, “Arrivals”, and finally, “Departures”. With a great night coming to an end and this tour now over, one has to wonder how the screamo/post-hardcore veterans will surprise fans in 2024. No matter what, they have always come through.

Photos by Jazmin Lemus

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For Dawoud Bey, history is anything but dead. Through the Hyde Park photographer’s eyes, and more specifically his lens, the events of the past are very much alive and tangled amid contemporary life.

A MacArthur Fellow whose intimate, evocative portraits have been the subject of major exhibitions across the country, Bey has shifted his focus in the past few years to the indelible mark people have had on place and space. And in particular, how the legacy of slavery still lives in the land.

Bey, 70, began this exploration in 2017 with his series Night Coming Tenderly Black, a set of large-scale black and white images that feature purported stops on the underground railroad in Ohio. “That work was about trying to visualize and imagine the landscape of fugitive activity,” Bey said. “How Black bodies moved across Northeastern Ohio in an act of self-liberation to get themselves to the other side of Lake Erie and Canada.”

From there, the Columbia College professor stepped further back in time and turned his camera to the places from which Black slaves escaped. In this case, the west banks of the Mississippi River in Louisiana where more than 350 plantations once stood. This set of images, which Bey titled In This Here Place, focus on Evergreen plantation, a well-preserved sugarcane plantation and historic landmark about 45 miles upriver from New Orleans.

And now, for his new photo series, Stony the Road, Bey has completed the triptych in Richmond, Virginia, where African men and women were sold into slavery. The series is part of an exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts titled Dawoud Bey: Elegy, which brings together the three projects for the first time. “Virginia was an epicenter for the import and export of Black bodies,” Bey said. “This is where this whole narrative basically begins, where 350,000 enslaved Africans walked into slavery.”

Along with the exhibit, which runs through February, Bey has published a book with Aperture. On the pages of Elegy, the 42 images create a haunting catalog of the American landscape. They illustrate, says Bey, how history reverberates in the present, how it doesn’t simply disappear. Bey shared with WBEZ contributor Elly Fishman, in his own words, the stories behind five Elegy photographs suspended somewhere between the past and present.

Irrigation Ditch

Bey: “This is Evergreen, which still has an active sugarcane business on that landscape. This is a view of that, but the picture itself is meant to pull you in and suggest the vastness of this landscape. That it goes on for as far as the eye can see. I’d never been on a plantation landscape before. I still haven’t seen a cotton field. Being in those sugarcane fields, and seeing the absolute enormity even of a reduced sugarcane operation, it really gives you a sense of the intensely grueling labor needed to harvest sugarcane.”

* * *

Cabin and Benches

“This slave cabin is from Evergreen plantation and is one of the 22 intact cabins that remain on the site. One of the reasons they’re so well-preserved is that they were occupied until as recently as 1947 by people who were the descendants of the enslaved. People who lived here as sharecroppers on the same land where their family had once been slaves. They lived here with no running water. No bathroom facilities. This cabin looks like someone just got up and walked away from the scene. There are benches still there. Even the parted curtain, it has a very haunted and haunting feeling to it.”

* * *

Conjoined Trees and Field

“There is something deeply human about these touching trees on this plantation landscape. It’s one of the few pictures that eems deeply allegorical in some way. These two touching trees and this once horrific landscape. It’s the persistence touch, and the persistence of connection, as suggested by trees, which are very much a living thing, too.”

* * *

Untitled #1 (Picket Fence and Farmhouse)

“I found this house from doing research on underground railroad safe houses in Cleveland. The site was not overly modernized and there’s the white picket fence, which is significant within the sociocultural sensibility of this country. The white picket fence signifies a kind of property demarcation. The very real aspiration to get your own house around which you can put a white picket fence to mark your space.”

* * *

Dawoud Bey at work in Cleveland at Lake Erie

“I very much want to keep working in the landscape tradition. For me, the human presence in these photographs hasn’t completely disappeared because it shapes how I make the photograph. They’re always eye level. I’m not doing interesting and unusual things with the camera to make interesting pictures. Even if the photographs look down, they’re looking down from a human vantage point. They are meant to suggest the human presence in that place. I actually see it as people, those Black presences, moving from in front of the camera to behind it.”

Elly Fishman is a freelance writer and the author of “Refugee High: Coming of Age in America.”

It was peak night in Sedona, AZ December 13-14, 2023 for the Geminids Meteor Shower. Weather was perfectly clear for most of the moonless night. Between 9:15 p.m. and 5 a.m., I made over 1000 images. See the initial cull of the images using Adobe Bridge here.

Capture

1,230 images captured during the night using the time-lapse feature with Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark III. A 7-14mm M. Zukio Pro f2.8 lens set at 7mm. Stars exposure was 20 seconds ISO 6400. Due to no light from the moon a separate foreground image was made. Exposure at 7mm 20 sec ISO 25,600. I used a Fotopro T-Roc Max tripod with a Platypod Elite ball head. The ball head is extremely strong and the T-Roc very light and strong which works well for hiking. I went about 3/4 of a mile with all my gear on the trail in Sedona. The hike was necessary to keep headlights from cars from interfering with the capture.

Processing

After all the images were downloaded into a folder, I checked them for meteors. Next, I opened a single image in Adobe Camera RAW and processed it to intensify the stars and open the shadows in the foreground a bit. That image was highlighted, and Control + Click (right-click on a PC) brings up a menu. Click on Develop Settings > Copy Settings. Select all the other images and Control + Click Develop Settings > Paste Settings. All of the settings are applied. In this case, it took a little over 35 minutes as I had done some masking in the process.

Photoshop

I selected images with meteors in Adobe Bridge. Next, I went to Tools > Photoshop > Load Files into Photoshop Layers to stack the files into layers. The master image was chosen and moved to the bottom of the stack. Option + Click on the bottom layer eyeball to turn off all other layers. Click on the eyeball of the second layer to turn it on. Add a Mask. Using a Paint Brush set to 100% Black remove the meteor. Making a brush just a little larger than your meteor click at one end, hold down the Shift key and click at the opposite end of the meteor. Holding the Shift key ensures a perfectly straight line between the two points. Finesse your mask selection and invert the mask. Voila! The meteor is now visible. Repeat these steps for the rest of the layers.

I recommend saving the image as a .PSD or as a Large Format Document, .PSB depending on how many layers you have. Keep saving every 10 minutes or so. You definitely don’t want to lose any work as you go along.

Rotation for meteor radiant

The sky has apparent movement throughout the night due to the rotation of the Earth. To show how the meteors come from the same general place in the sky, additional work needs to be done to the files. When making the exposures I made sure to have Polaris in the frame. Having that point which does not move makes it easy to line up all of the meteor exposures to show the radiant, or origin, point. I rotated all the meteor strikes around the North Star lining up the Big Dipper. See the original placement of meteor captures below.

Tips for rotation

Here are some tips for making the lining up of the images easier. Start at the bottom layer and as before Option + Click on the eyeball to turn off all other layers visibility. Take two guides and place a horizontal and vertical over Polaris. Turn on layer two. Invert the mask to reveal most of the layer. Change the Blend Mode of the layer to Difference. Activate the Transform Tool. Press Cmd + T or Ctrl + T on PC. Move the rotation point from the center of the image to the point over Polaris. Rotate the layer until most of the stars disappear. In this case, I looked for the Big Dipper to line up. Accept the transformation. Invert the mask and change the Blend Mode back to Normal. Repeat for the rest of the layers. If you don’t see the rotation point for the Transform Tool in the top left-hand corner, there is a check box that will turn it on and off.

Blending foreground

Due to the dark skies I made an image for the foreground. Since I set the ISO to 25,600, there was some noise with which to deal. Adobe Camera RAW and the Denoise worked well. When using Denoise, be careful about applying too much. There is a point of diminishing return. In this case, I set it at about 40. This removed the most objectionable color noise yet still left me with detail and not mushing up the red rocks.

Final cleanup

It’s time for final cleanup of the masks around the meteors. Ensure masks are accurate by zooming in close. What looked as if it was fine when you first made it may need a little adjustment after the rotation. You may also do some final tweaking of the tones on your starry background, brighten the meteors a bit and tone up or down the foreground to make it mesh.

When done, go have a celebratory coffee, wine or cocktail. You deserve it! Let me know how this works for you.

More on meteor showers and nightscape photography

Here are some links on capturing meteor showers:

Did I mention it was a wee bit cold in the overnight shoot? And, I loved every minute.

Yours in creative Photography, Bob

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People typically looked for one thing in pictures of Shane MacGowan, photographer Andrew Catlin has said: a shot of the late Pogues frontman with his mouth agape, those infamous teeth on display.

Catlin, a photographer, director and filmmaker whose work is on display at the National Portrait Gallery, reflected on his memories of working with MacGowan – and his friend and fellow musician, Sinead O’Connor – after attending the Anglo-Irish singer’s funeral in Dublin.

One of the most famous shots of MacGowan, taken by Catlin, was seen on the artist’s coffin as the funeral procession took place, and later displayed during the service at St Mary of the Rosary Church.

“They wanted a picture of his mouth open, his teeth all showing looking as grotesque as possible,” Catlin told The Independent of how many people expected to see the “Fairytale of New York” singer.

“That’s all everyone ever wanted for a long-time and it seemed to me that it was really irrelevant.”

As both a friend and a photo subject, MacGowan could be “very difficult”, Catlin said, “but he was never nasty”.

“He was either bored or he didn’t want to engage with you,” he explained. “And then he would just switch off and ignore everything. He could be in a room full of people and not be there at all – people thought he was always completely out of it, but he just wasn’t interested in whatever was going on.”

If someone happened to say something that caught MacGowan’s interest, though, he would “snap out of it” and come out with “an incredible, intelligent, well-informed opinion”.

“He was so sharp,” Catlin said. “And he was incredibly interested in people – if they weren’t interesting, that’s when he’d switch off. And he didn’t like people who were full of s**t.”

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Some of Catlin’s favourite portraits of MacGowan were taken in Porto, Portugal, around 1989, while the band were going through a particularly difficult period.

“Shane was going crazy because they’ve been touring nonstop for like four years or something, and he was acting more and more like he didn’t want to be there,” Catlin recalled. “You could really see it was starting to unravel at that point.”

Catlin and MacGowan stayed up drinking all night, until the musician decided he was willing to do a photo session.

“He was acting out the madness that was going on in his head, and he kind of transformed into all these different characters,” Catlin said. “There’s one where he looks like he’s being crucified, and another where he’s got a fistful of cash.

“It was always fantastic working with Shane – you just had to wait until the mood was right.”

Catlin met MacGowan’s friend, Sinead O’Connor, when he was commissioned to shoot the then-21-year-old for a music magazine. After missing his flight to Los Angeles, he feared he’d lost the gig, but a twist of fate meant that, around a month later, he discovered that O’Connor had moved into the flat two floors above his.

O’Connor died aged 56 in July, a year after the death of her son Shane.

“She was just an extraordinary character, you know?” Catlin said. “She wasn’t at all arrogant – she was interested and curious.

“This was before she’d had a hit record, but she’d already been through so much in life. Yet she maintained this incredible openness her whole life – most people become really guarded after a long time in the music industry.”

Catlin’s photos of O’Connor show her wide-eyed, gazing into the lens, with her hands clasped to her face. Her hair is freshly shaved: “The record company told her to wear more makeup and get dressed up, so she shaved her hair off,” Catlin said.

The pair met often after that first shoot. The last time Catlin saw her was at MacGowan’s 60th birthday at the National Concert Hall in Dublin, which “celebrated Shane surviving to 60”.

“He was presented with some kind of lifetime achievement award at the end, which I think he was very moved by – as someone who grew up outside Ireland but loved it and spent a lot of time there,” Catlin said. “That was quite an important thing for him.”

MacGowan’s funeral, attended by thousands of fans along with the musicians close friends and family, was an “amazing experience”, he said, and “absolutely in keeping with everything he was about”.

He found himself seated in one of the front pews near MacGowan’s former Pogues bandmates, and Michael D Higgins, president of Ireland.

“It lasted for more than three hours, and it was absolutely electric for every second of it,” he said. “It was emotional, beautiful, funny and extraordinary.”