Hickory Daily Record senior photojournalist Robert C. Reed is retiring this month, marking the end of a 48-year career of chronicling the Catawba Valley.

Reed started at the Record in 1975 while he was still a student at Hickory High School.

Reflecting on his long career, Reed said the thing he will miss the opportunity the job gave him to meet people. He said he was shy at the beginning of his Record tenure and did not know how to talk to people. The job soon cured him of that.

Reed said the biggest story of his career was the 2010 murder of 10-year-old Zahra Baker and subsequent legal proceedings against Zahra’s stepmother Elisa, who pleaded guilty to the murder.

The case received international attention, giving Reed’s images of the case the largest audience he ever had.

At the same time, that side of the job – as Reed puts it, “the blood and guts, car wrecks, shootings, stabbings, murder in general, people being animals instead of human beings” – is the type of thing he won’t miss once he lays down the camera.

“The no. 1 thing I’m going to not miss is having to stick my camera lens in the face of grieving parents, which literally will sometimes bring you to tears and it has with me,” Reed said. “It’s the human side of me but I’m lucky I can hide behind a camera.”

At the same time, Reed has also focused much of his attention on capturing the small moments that define life in Hickory and the surrounding area.

“That’s the fun part of this job catching people kind of off guard, catching them in a natural moment where they weren’t really planning on having their photo shot that day but I caught ‘em,” Reed said. “I’ve got a bad tendency to always photograph first and ask questions later, which has led to some really great images and has also led to me getting chewed out.”

Reed has spent the last few months compiling a collection of such photos in advance of his retirement. These images cover a range of scenes of life in the area, and include a firefighter putting out a blaze in a vacant building, a mother and daughter trick or treating, and a Lenoir-Rhyne quarterback throwing a pass.

These are Reed’s parting shots.

Vivo’s X series of flagships often fall under the radar in mainstream tech press, partly because the phones come so late in the year—usually mid-December, when much of the Western media are already in holiday mode—and mainly because Vivo, unlike fellow Chinese brands Oppo and Xiaomi, does not hold lavish launch events in Europe or Asian metropolises.

But within the Android phone nerd circles, particularly those who are into mobile photography, the X series has become one of the most anticipated releases of the year. That’s because Vivo’s last few X flagship phones had a strong case for being the best camera phone on the market when they launched. And the just-launched X100 Pro is no exception.

In fact, I’m going to remove the word “arguably” for the X100 Pro in one particular category: in portrait photography, the X100 Pro is the best performer of any smartphone right now, period.

The X100 Pro sports a 50-megapixel Periscope zoom lens and Zeiss’ APO “floating design” with a new Vario-Apo-Sonnar elements. What does that mean in plain English? The lens can shift forward and backward so it can get focus on subjects at various distances. Vivo also gave the camera a fast f/2.5 aperture and a relatively large 1/2-inch sensor. The result is the most capable zoom lens hardware in a phone.

But that’s not all, Vivo also has a really good software algorithm—one that I’ve praised for the last few years—that always fine tunes HDR for balanced dynamic range. There’s also a vintage filter that makes photos look less digital and feel more like an analog film camera.

Here are 100mm portraits I’ve snapped over the past few weeks of using the phone. The zoom lens is so good, producing shots that look organic and lively with natural-looking bokeh, that it has inspired me to become an amateur street photographer of sorts, snapping at least a few hundred photos a day.

Vivo’s zoom lens can produce cleaner, noise-free images than most other smartphone zoom cameras. The difference is very noticeable in low-light conditions. The below photos of the cats are impressively noise-free for low-light zoom photos snapped with a phone.

I’m particularly blown away by this shot below of the espresso machine. Notice there’s subtle background and foreground bokeh (depth-of-field blur), giving the image depth that smartphone shots usually lack.

Outside of the zoom lens, the X100 Pro also has a capable 1-inch main camera but this is nothing new, it’s similar to last year’s excellent X90 Pro Plus.

The rest of the phone is also very similar to last year’s X90, with a similar design language with a curved 120Hz OLED screen. There is a new chip powering the phone, the MediaTek Dimensity 9300 which is a flagship chip, but not quite as efficient as rival the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.

The Dimensity chip is powerful enough to handle most daily tasks, but battery life doesn’t seem to last as long as Snapdragon-powered phones, and the X100 Pro runs warmer than usual. Not a huge deal, by the way, just a minor shortcoming.

The X100 Pro really isn’t too special in areas of processing power or display or user interface. What sets it apart is the camera system, especially the zoom lens. It’s so good, it makes me want to stop and snap photos of my surroundings.

Brodbeck & de Barbuat’s 2021 work, The 1000 Lives of Isis, commissioned by the Centre National des Arts Plastiques and the Jeu de Paume, and supported by the French Ministry of Culture, featured a digitally synthesized image of Isis. The series portrayed a young woman with a strikingly lifelike appearance. In their latest project, the duo continue to “explore new ways of practicing photography and how new technologies become embedded in the medium’s history.”

They note that, since its inception, photography has flirted with reality, yet it offers only a representation of the real. The early, nineteenth-century staged compositions are a case in point: for example Julia Margaret Cameron’s allegories, currently on view at the Jeu de Paume (until January 28, 2024), or the images manipulated by various twentieth-century dictatorships to expunge disgraced figures. The advent of editing tools in the 2000s facilitated these practices, making them commonplace.

Brodbeck & de Barbuat’s 2022 series, launched before the widespread adoption of user-friendly AI applications, pursues a distinct goal. Subtitled Study in Artificial Intelligence and the Mechanisms of Memory, the series reflects a concerted effort “to engage in a dialogue with the machine,” as the duo sought to comprehend how AI interprets and responds to specific prompts.

The AI-generated outcomes are the product of an extensive database of images: “Initially, we wanted to test these tools’ capabilities, discovering that they could recreate nineteenth-century images using only a date and the specific technique, without referencing the original photographer.”

The clever idea was to choose iconic images embedded in collective memory. These serve as benchmarks for evaluating the results: “We went into the details, describing the scene in the image, sometimes specifying the date of creation so that the result is consistent with the original. For example, for Robert Capa’s Falling Soldier, if you don’t specify the date, you get a Vietnam War GI.”

The strength of the series lies in the editing, an essential, fundamental step in any photographer’s craft. “We chose to preserve the errors and accidents as they are quite telling.” Take for instance Helmut Newton’s photograph of a woman diving into a pool. “Since nudity is taboo for AI, we are offered a clothed version, elongated like a model, but whose body is no longer human.”

Some recreations are remarkably realistic, like the rendition of John Lennon and Yoko Ono based on Annie Leibovitz’s work, albeit with the machine “clothing” the singer and partially undressing his companion. In Marc Riboud’s The Eiffel Tower Painter, the monument is anomalously duplicated. As for the body of Charis in Edward Weston’s iconic nude, it is recreated with imperfections yet retains a superficial likeness.

Beyond the anecdotal bugs, what is interesting is how these images challenge us as humans. Looking at these avatars, we can sometimes spot the defects immediately, as with the unnaturally smooth face of Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, and other times only upon closer inspection. This forces us to acknowledge our own cognitive shortcomings. Although we believe we know these iconic images well, our recollection often proves to be inaccurate. “How can our memory be so imprecise, yet so trusted?” ponder the artists. This series thus offers a disquieting experience, confronting us not just with the limitations of AI, but also with our own perceptual frailties.

Brodbeck & de Barbuat, Une histoire parallèle: Étude sur l’intelligence artificielle et les mécanismes du souvenir. Galerie Papillon, 13, rue Chapon, 75003 Paris. Until janvier 13, 2024.

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Beta Terms By using the Beta Site, you agree that such use is at your own risk and you know that the Beta Site may include known or unknown bugs or errors, that we have no obligation to make this Beta Site available with or without charge for any period of time, nor to make it available at all, and that nothing in these Beta Terms or your use of the Beta Site creates any employment relationship between you and us. The Beta Site is provided on an “as is” and “as available” basis and we make no warranty to you of any kind, express or implied.

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A photography exhibition that for long has been an attraction at Kibbutz Nahal Oz was badly damaged from Hamas’ incessant shooting on October 7, but the show must go on; The exhibition will reopen in the northern Kibbutz of Ein Harod

Copyright 2023 BBC. All rights reserved.  The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Read about our approach to external linking.

Beta Terms By using the Beta Site, you agree that such use is at your own risk and you know that the Beta Site may include known or unknown bugs or errors, that we have no obligation to make this Beta Site available with or without charge for any period of time, nor to make it available at all, and that nothing in these Beta Terms or your use of the Beta Site creates any employment relationship between you and us. The Beta Site is provided on an “as is” and “as available” basis and we make no warranty to you of any kind, express or implied.

In case of conflict between these Beta Terms and the BBC Terms of Use these Beta Terms shall prevail.