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Spectacular Ice Sculpture Exhibition Opens in Prague’s Riegrovy Sady
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You can crowdsource a Lego Leica M6
Earlier this year we wrote about a pretty cool Lego Ansel Adams set that was being crowdsourced through Lego’s Ideas platform, and a random scrolling over the weekend just showed up another sweet looking project – a Lego version of the legendary Leica M6.
Created by user ChiefHilariousRaisin100, the model takes a version of the camera first introduced by Leica Camera AG in 1984, and gives it a Lego twist with two films and a Leica Summicron Coll.2/5 Cm SOOIC lens.
Today the M6 remains highly regarded by photographers and collectors, making it one of the more expensive second hand film Leica’s on the used market, with good models selling for upwards of $2,000.
This particular Lego model has a lot more work to do than the Ansel Adams set to reach production however. It hit 100 supporters within the first 60 days, with Lego rewarding it with a one-year boost to give it time to reach 1,000 supporters. The Adams set by comparison hit 10,000 supporters and is currently in the review stage, which means it may enter production.
The pitch for votes comes at the same time as Lego US officially confirmed it will launch a nifty ‘retro camera set‘ just after Christmas, although there’s no word if that particular set will make it downunder.
You can check out the M6 for yourself here.
New Haven photographer’s passion project takes her across the country
FORT WAYNE, Ind. (WPTA) – “So God, what am I doing here?”
Angela Forker asked that question in 2018 as she reflected on her life up to that point. She had been a missionary, active in the church her husband led and now a newborn photographer.
She used handmade, ornate scenes to place her subjects in a whole other world, making the infants look like they were running, dancing or jumping. Forker said God then placed it in her heart to take those scenes in another direction — special needs children.
He even gave her a name for it, Precious Baby Project, a play on her business’s name, Precious Baby Photography, Forker said. It allows her to put the babies in a positive light and bring awareness to the conditions the children live with.
Forker said her work shows parents of special needs children they aren’t alone and helps them connect with other families who have a child with the same condition as their child.
“It’s just been such an amazing time of my life — showing the world the beauty and value of babies with special needs,” Forker said. “That life that maybe turned out a little different than what you expected as a mom and a dad and yet there’s still so much love and so much beauty.”
“I’m just showing the world that beauty.”
Those who are interested in having their child’s photo taken by Forker can learn more about the process here.
Aside from a lull during the COVID-19 pandemic, Forker has been hard at work making photos for the Precious Baby Project. Her work has taken her as far as Latvia to photograph terminally ill children and brought families from all over the nation to her studio to feature their special needs children in her fantastical scenes.
Most recently, her work led her to Seattle where two parents, Owen and Julia, and their son Joshua, a baby with hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy — a condition caused by oxygen deprivation — were waiting for her with open arms. Joshua’s father was a pastor before stepping down to help care for his son, Forker said.
She said the family was still processing their son’s condition, navigating being first-time parents as well as being parents of a “medically fragile” child who came into the world with his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck three times.
“They had several friends who were pregnant at the same time and they all had perfect babies,” Forker said. “And they had Joshua, who they loved so much, and it’s like your dreams are just crushed in that moment.”
Despite what they may have had planned for their lives and son, Forker said, the parents had to adjust what they expected their son’s life to look like. In many ways, she said, the photo shoot was as much for Owen and Julia as it was for photos of their son.
“As I prayed, I felt like God was saying ‘It’s more than the photos, you’re going out there for this couple,” Forker said.
After preparing everything for the shoot and just before she began photographing Joshua, she prayed over him as she often does with her subjects — this time including his parents. Shortly before the shoot, Forker said she felt God wanted her to share with the family that he had not forgotten them.
Deuteronomy 31:7-8 had come to her and seemed to be perfect for the family to hear, she said.
Little did Forker know, the verse was Joshua’s life verse, a verse by which someone lives their life.
After their prayers, it was time to get to work on the scene she said came to her immediately after she learned about the family: Joshua and the Battle of Jericho.
Copyright 2023 WPTA. All rights reserved.
Your Best Shot: The Dec/Jan 2024 picks!
After more than a decade of our photo competition Your Best Shot being only open to AP magazine readers and subscribers, we’ve decided to shake things up and open it up to everyone in Australia to enter from 2024.
There’s a different theme in every issue of AP mag, and you can win great prizes thanks to our good friends at Blonde Robot, the Australasian distributors of Peak Design, 3 Legged Thing, and Angelbird.
If you’d like to enter yourself in 2024, you can find out all the details here.
To give you a taster of what to expect, here were our selections for the December/January 2024 edition of the competition. Our winner for this issue, Rudy Kalele, took home a Peak Design Travel Tripod Aluminium valued at $669.
Dec/Jan theme: Night
Our modern cameras make it easy to take photos when light levels are low, but the fundamentals of good photography still apply. You need a great subject, great composition, and great lighting – regardless of how little you have to work with. Here are our picks this issue.
This issue’s winner
Editor’s comment
As Rudy Kalele says it, night photography is all about light painting.
Here, he tells us a perfect opportunity presented itself at Canberra’s Floriade NightFest. “The slow moving giant wheel provided the perfect backdrop,” he explains. “The challenge was to take a long exposure shot, but not too long so as to bring out the full spectrum of colour and not whitewash the photo. A small aperture was deployed to try and get the star effect with the harsh light facing the camera.”
This is a great shot with a nice leading line through the flowerbeds that take us all the way to that amazingly bright giant ferris wheel. On the use of colour, you’ve done well to preserve the important bits without overcooking them either – no mean feat in a scene with some seriously busy lighting! Well done.
Runner-up
Editor’s comment
Dani Maver’s image Supermood may be a blend of two images, August’s super blue moon seen from Melbourne, and a crow on the roof through foliage, but they come together to make a very moody, atmospheric image that has a real cinematic vibe to it.
Your processing of the final image is also great, preserving the noise to add a bit of grit – something we probably don’t see enough of in an era of pin-sharp lenses and high definition camera sensors!
How I did it
This shot was taken in the Dark Sky Reserve near Mannum in SA. The Milky Way sits nicely above the abandoned tractor, and I used a torch to illuminate the tractor from different angles to try and highlight the machinery with several images at F5. I then exposed for the night sky at F2.8 taking several images before I finally blended the shots in Lightroom and Photoshop.
How I did it
This image is over 200 x 30 second exposure shots taken from about 3:15am – 5:15am one beautiful morning. I purposely chose this time so I could get that early morning glow in my image to really bring it to life with these beautiful star trails!
How I did it
The Paul Wild Observatory near Narrabri occasionally opens its gates at night to a limited number of keen astrophotographers, but unfortunately not on the night of the lunar eclipse in May, 2021.
Still, I managed to capture this image of one of the radio telescopes on a night the next month and incorporate 41 images of the lunar eclipse captured at another regional location.
The images of the moon were taken every seven minutes, with six to eight separate photographs for each one (stacked to improve the quality). I used a star tracker to capture the middle ten images to avoid blurring due to the movement of the moon. The final image is a compilation of more than 250 separate photographs, adjusted in Lightroom and blended in Photoshop.
How I did it
I visited Narooma early in the milky way season on a night near the new moon, so Narooma Beach was pitch-black and I couldn’t see Glasshouse Rocks with my small head torch. I boosted the ISO to 12800 to compose this photo and waited for the small waves to rush around the foreground boulder.
The shots I captured with a lower ISO were just too dark, so I stuck with the higher ISO, knowing I could use the Lightroom de-noise function to reduce the noise. The orange airglow made the photo muddy, even with changes to the white balance, so I turned the image to monochrome.
I boosted blacks, highlights and whites a little to bring out the stars, waves and distant lighthouse. I also added a little clarity and contrast.
Shifting patterns: The global art market
The global art market was worth an estimated $67.8 billion in 2022, after a 3% year-on-year increase, according to Art Basel and UBS’s The Art Market 2023. Art-based NFTs — nonfungible tokens the report describes as blockchain-based, unique digital identifiers that point to digital files such as images, video, or music — accounted for $1.5 billion in sales last year. Two years after art-based NFTs became available, buyers moved from the primary to the secondary market. Reselling became the main activity, making up 80% of the market’s value and 61% of transactions in 2022.
A shift to online channels — and the rise of NFT platforms — allows artists to sell directly to buyers rather than through galleries and auction houses.
Perhaps surprisingly, given the shift to direct sales, 16% of dealers rated expanding their physical premises as the top priority when looking five years ahead.
Major auction houses Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips have opened or are planning new headquarters in Hong Kong in 2023 and 2024. Also, Sotheby’s has opened a new Shanghai base for its China business, which the Art Basel and UBS report indicated.
Photographer Revolutionizes Technique by Holding Lens Wrong Way,
Los Angeles, CA: In a bold move defying decades of established practice, local photographer Max Carter has turned the photography world upside down—literally—by opting to hold his camera lens over the top, instead of the traditional support from underneath. This unconventional technique has sparked a mixture of outrage, confusion, and reluctant admiration within the photography community.
“I was just looking for a new perspective,” Carter explained, nonchalantly flipping his Canon EOS R5 over. “Everyone holds their lens from the bottom. I thought, ‘Why not be different?’ Plus, it’s a great forearm workout.”
Carter’s unusual grip was first noticed during a beach photoshoot. Fellow photographers, initially thinking he was correcting a lens error, soon realized it was intentional. The scene quickly erupted into a mixture of gasps, scoffs, and a few intrigued murmurs.
Renowned photographer Linda Evans, present at the scene, commented: “I’ve seen many trends come and go, but this is absurd. How can you possibly stabilize the shot? It’s like he’s trying to make a smoothie with his camera!”
Online photography forums have been buzzing with debates over Carter’s technique. Some traditionalists have called it a “reckless gimmick,” while a few avant-garde photographers have praised it as a “revolutionary approach challenging the norms.”
Carter’s Instagram post, showcasing a beach sunset with the caption “Upside Down, Right Side Up,” received a record number of comments. “Is this a new filter?” asked one confused follower. Another commented, “Innovative or insane? Hard to tell.”
Photography instructor Kevin Smith weighed in: “While it’s essential to explore new techniques, there’s a reason we support lenses from underneath—it’s about physics, balance, and reducing camera shake. But who knows, maybe Carter is onto something, or maybe he just likes living life on the edge, quite literally.”
Despite the controversy, Carter keeps his experimental spirit, vowing to shoot with the rear screen instead of the viewfinder at his next shoot. When Smith heard of this, all he could say was: “too far. It’s just disrespectful.”
In a recent development, a camera accessory company has hinted at designing a “Carter Grip” in honor of this unconventional method. Whether this will become a new trend or remain a quirky blip in photography history remains to be seen. Meanwhile, Carter continues to turn heads and lenses, one shot at a time.
Suspect returns controversial sculpture to Manhattan cathedral with note
Officials with the cathedral say the sculpture represents Christ in the female form and is reflective of its mission to be a house of prayer for all people.
Perspective | Showing the true face of dementia through photography
Helen Rimell’s mother was her rock, “a ray of light in a troubled world,” she says. In 2015, Rimell’s mother was diagnosed with early onset vascular dementia. That’s when Rimell, a documentary photographer based in Britain, started documenting her relationship with her mother.
“I began this project as a way of preserving her, of keeping who she was alive,” Rimell says. Her intimate photos, which portray all aspects of her mother’s life, are at times brutal and heartbreaking. “[There’s] no hiding from the horrors and indignities, the true face of dementia, the pain, heartbreak, fear, and all that is lost.”
Rimell’s work has received this year’s Bob & Diane Fund Award, a photographic award dedicated to work that increases the understanding of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. It was started by Gina Martin, who lost her mother to Alzheimer’s.
“Helen’s images of her mother and family made an immediate impact on us when looking at this year’s submissions for the Bob and Diane Fund grant,” says photographer Chip Somodevilla, who served on this year’s jury. “The images were intense and unblinking in their intimacy, all on top of their strong use of color and composition.”
The award comes with $5,000, which Rimell plans to use to produce a photo book that will include the “raw, vulnerable and emotional messages” she wrote to a loved one as she cared for her mother over the past few years. “It [has been] an incredibly difficult journey for us both, but one that I have chosen to take with her for as long as I can,” she said.
Dan Lam Blurs the Lines Between the Alluring and Grotesque in ‘Guttation’
“Replicate.” All images © Dan Lam, shared with permission
Guttation is a botanical process that occurs when fungi or plants like grasses and ferns secrete sap from their pores. Small droplets of dew will emerge and then hang from fronds or leaves to help relieve the specimen of too much liquid accumulating in its roots.
Dallas-based artist Dan Lam evokes this vital act in an upcoming solo show at Hashimoto Contemporary in New York. Guttation comprises more than 60 of Lam’s signature drippy sculptures that take a turn toward the grotesque in comparison to previous bodies of work. Titled with biological names like “Gall,” “Gland,” and “Stomata,” the technicolor pieces vacillate between the unequivocally synthetic materials—resin, polyurethane, foam, and acrylic—and their gurgling, oozing forms.
While small, clear droplets cover some of the sculptures, others feature more mottled surfaces that veer toward revulsion. Thick, translucent glaze cloaks speckled works like “Stomata” and “Bark,” capturing her fascination with nature’s bizarre, unruly qualities and the potentially strange results of evolution and survival.
Guttation runs from December 16 to January 6. Find more of Lam’s work on her site and Instagram.
“Gall”
“Bulb”
“Stomata”
“Bark”
“Concentration”
“Fluid”
“Membrane”
“Pressure”
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Dan Lam Blurs the Lines Between the Alluring and Grotesque in ‘Guttation’ appeared first on Colossal.
“It’s not typical to use on-camera flash in landscape photography, but I’m increasingly drawn to it”
About Benedict Brain
Benedict Brain is a UK-based photographer, journalist and artist. He is an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society and sits on the society’s Distinctions Advisory Panel. He is also a past editor of Digital Camera Magazine, and the author of You Will be Able to Take Great Photos by The End of This Book.
The magical red of dogwood twigs is one of the joys of the winter landscape for me. The bare skeletal structures of trees and plants in general appeal to my aesthetic sensibilities: I find their delicate shapes more interesting than the lush green foliage of summer. Perhaps this speaks to my state of mind. Who knows?
This patch of wild dogwood was captured on a route along the River Avon in Bath, near where I live. It’s a flood zone that is enduringly fascinating to me, and rich with photographic potential. It’s along a path that I run down regularly, so even when I’m without my camera, I delight in its ever-changing appearance and make photos in my mind’s eye.
On this particular day in early January, it was super-cold and, even in the late afternoon, the frost hadn’t melted away. I’d never seen it looking quite so exquisite so, as soon I was home from my run, I grabbed my kit and headed back out to shoot photos.
It was twilight by the time I got back to the location. I made some images with a tripod, but I wasn’t capturing the ‘magical’ vibe I was feeling, so I decided to ditch the tripod and use an on-camera flash on my medium-format Fujifilm GFX. Using manual exposure, I balanced the sky with flash, lighting the dogwood. Bingo! The flashgun light accentuated the red hues of the twigs and captured the glistening frost with a sparkle. The harmonious relationship between the colors of the twilight sky and the twigs seemed perfect to me.
It’s not typical to use on-camera flash in landscape photography, but I’m finding that I’m increasingly drawn to it. I’m seduced by the otherworldly rendering of the land and its features that the artificial light produces, and perhaps the maverick approach appeals to my inner rebel.
In a way, this image also reminds me of an underwater scene: the combination of the color palette and the sea fern-esque shape of the twigs echo a coral reef.
• Other articles in the Art of Seeing series
Read more:
• The 50 best photographers ever
• 100 best photography quotes from famous photographers
• The best coffee-table books on photography
