Volunteers helping Project Soldier say that they would not be alive, or have a free country, if it wasn’t for the service of these veterans
WYOMING, Mich. — The Korean War is sometimes thought of as the “Forgotten War.” To Project Soldier, and the veterans that Rami Hyun photographs, the Korean War is nowhere near forgotten.
Project Soldier began in 2013 when Hyun sought to honor active duty soldiers in South Korea by capturing portraits, but that mission has now grown into photographing Korean War Veterans from the 22 nations that came to South Korea’s aid over 70 years ago.
“Everybody here, including me, say we want free country. The freedom to us was not a duty, it was a right for us because somebody sacrificed, especially Korean War veteran sacrifice of freedom for us is the reason my mom, my father, are still alive because they sacrificed themselves,” said Hyun.
Close to 20 Korean War Veterans came to Hahn-In Church in Wyoming, where they had portraits taken of themselves and their families. They were able to sign helmets used during the Korean War that will be displayed in South Korea, along with being able to share their stories with fellow veterans and volunteers from Michigan’s Korean American community.
Anne Kong said she was volunteering at the event because she wanted to hear the stories of the veterans who defended the country where she was born.
“It’s not easy, let alone fighting for your own country, but other countries. So we’re very thankful, and we don’t think that we would have the freedom that we have today without their efforts,” said Kong
The Korean War began in 1950 when North Korea invaded U.S. Allied South Korea. The fighting ended in an armistice in 1953, and claimed the lives of over 36,000 U.S soldiers.
Robert Burnett served in the First Calvary Division with the Seventh Regiment, and said that he never expected to be treated the way he was at by Project Soldier and the volunteers.
“I can’t imagine anything like this ever happened and my wildest imagination, I couldn’t believe this stuff like this should happen. Shows you people do respect the veterans,” Burnett said.
George Stark served in Korea in the Fifth Regimental Combat Team. He served in Korea in the months leading into the armistice, and says he is proud to have defended a country that is now prospering.
“When they sometimes say that Korea was a forgotten war, we like to call it a forgotten victory,” said Stark.
Hyun says that taking portraits of these veterans captures their story, and he can see the change in how they view themselves when they see their photographs.
“They have a lot of guilt because they survived the war, but the picture is not taken just outside, pictures are taken inside too, so when they see their own portrait they will realize they are not a coward, they are actually a hero,” Hyun said.
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John Fielder photographed Colorado’s beauty for 50 years.
SUMMIT COUNTY, Colo. — Award-winning nature photographer John Fielder died Friday after a battle with cancer.
Fielder had documented the Colorado landscapes through his camera lenses since 1973. He’s probably best known for his “Colorado 1870-2000” photograph book series that he made in partnership with History Colorado. In that series, Fielder matched photos taken by William Henry Jackson more than 100 years prior.
>Video above: interview with John Fielder about his photography donation to History Colorado.
Fielder was also a strong supporter of nature preservation efforts around the state. His photographs moved people and garnered him recognition and awards including the Sierra Club’s Ansel Adams Award in 1993 and the Aldo Leopold Foundation’s Achievement Award in 2011. He was the first individual to be awarded the latter award.
Earlier this year, Fielder announced he was donating 5,000 photographs to History Colorado.
Below are some of Fielder’s photographs that were entrusted to the museum.
“My goal was always to reveal and preserve the essence of the place that I think is the most beautiful on Earth: Colorado,” Fielder said in January. “I am humbled that these photos have inspired others and spurred the passage of numerous environmental protection projects and laws across this beautiful state that I love and cherish.”
Gov. Jared Polis released the following statement on Fielder’s passing:
“I am saddened by the loss of John Fielder, who captured Colorado’s iconic beauty during his 50 years as a nature photographer. His unique talent and work allowed him to showcase our state to millions across the world and he will be dearly missed. My condolences to his family and friends. I hope that we can all follow his example to appreciate and preserve our outdoor lands.”
Fielder’s family will hold a private memorial service at a later date, according to a report from Summit Daily.
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John Fielder, Colorado’s preeminent nature photographer, has died at the age of 73.
His daughter, Kay Fielder, confirmed his death to multiple media outlets. She said he died on Friday after a struggle with pancreatic cancer.
Gov. Jared Polis released a statement mourning the photographer.
“I am saddened by the loss of John Fielder, who captured Colorado’s iconic beauty during his 50 years as a nature photographer. His unique talent and work allowed him to showcase our state to millions across the world and he will be dearly missed,.
“My condolences to his family and friends. I hope that we can all follow his example to appreciate and preserve our outdoor lands.”
Fielder may best known for his “Colorado 1870-2000” photograph book series that he made in partnership with History Colorado. In that series, Fielder matched photos taken by William Henry Jackson more than a century earlier.
In January, Fielder donated his Colorado photography to History Colorado. The museum will be home for a collection of more than 7,000 photos distilled from 200,000 he made since 1973, and which are now available to the public for personal and commercial use.
Just last month — on July 22 — the History Colorado Center in downtown Denver unveiled a new exhibit called “REVEALED: John Fielder’s Favorite Place.”
On his website, Fielder said he first visited Colorado at the age of 14 during a school field trip from North Carolina:
“In all my life, I have not forgotten my first sight of the Rockies rising up before me over the plains. I was simply smitten by this wall of snow-capped peaks above a treeless plain. And the word C-O-L-O-R-A-D-O, it was the most poetic name for a place I had ever heard. I realized at that moment that someone or something had guided me to this place, and that I belonged here for the rest of my life.”
His awards included the Sierra Club’s Ansel Adams Award in 1993 and the Aldo Leopold Foundation’s Achievement Award in 2011. He was the first individual to be awarded the latter award.
Fielder leaves behind two daughters Ashley and Katy, and six grandchildren. John lost his wife Gigi to Alzheimer’s disease in 2005 and their son J.T. in 2006.
Fielder requested donations be made to Sierra Club, Conservation Colorado, Colorado Open Lands and Save the Colorado.
The family will conduct a private memorial service at a later date.
A basic understanding of the physics of light can help us to achieve the best possible photographic results. Here are some very simplified explanations of how what we learned in school science lessons can affect what we do with our cameras.
There’s a lot more to light than meets the eye. Okay, so that’s an awful pun, but it is both metaphorically and literally correct. Not only is it a more complex subject than we need to know in our everyday lives, there is a lot more light hitting you than your retina can convert into nerve impulses that are sent to the brain. There is less light than that landing on your camera sensor that gets turned into an electronic signal and transmitted to the camera’s processor.
In other words, our eyes can’t see all the light there is, much of it is invisible to us, but they see more than our cameras.
On a bright day, you will see most of the details in both the bright highlights of the sky and the deep shadows under objects on the ground simultaneously. Your camera, with a single exposure, can’t see as wide a range of tones. However, modern sensor technology has improved dramatically and, as you can see from the image above, they have the ability to see both highlights and details in darker areas. It wasn’t that many years ago when I would have had to bracket the exposures of that scene and then combine them to create a high dynamic range (HDR) image to be able to see the top of the lighthouse when pointing the camera directly at the sunrise.
As we get older, our eyes gradually lose our capability to see as wide a range of tones as we did in our youth. Nevertheless, we should see between 18 and 20 stops of tonal range between black and white. Top-of-the-range cameras are between 12 and 15 stops, although a recent sensor developed this year claims 24.6 stops. Don’t worry too much about that, though; your camera will still take fabulous pictures.
What we call visible light is a tiny fraction of the total electromagnetic spectrum that we and our cameras can see. I find it quite incredible that we can differentiate the different colors of the spectrum that occur in a range that’s only 320 nanometers wide. In other words, we can tell apart all seven colors that comprise white light plus all their combinations.
We are fortunate that most of the photons that hit the earth fall into the bandwidth from 380 to 700 nanometers. It is a happy accident resulting from our planet being in the Goldilocks zone, exactly the right distance from the right type of star. Plus our atmosphere has an ozone layer that filters out the ultraviolet light that would cause us sunburn and worse. If we were bathed in more energetic particles, such as UV or gamma radiation, we would not last long before we were cooked. At the other extreme, if the wavelengths reaching us were a bit longer, we would need much bigger eyes and would have difficulties threading a needle.
As the earth spins and dawn arrives, we see the sun appear before it’s physically above the horizon. That’s because, like passing through a prism or raindrops, the light bends when it hits the atmosphere. Consequently, that bending of light, called refraction, means we can see below the horizon. It’s the same effect as when you put a spoon into a glass of water and see it bend.
White light is made up of seven different colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. We see these in a rainbow and on the cover of The Dark Side of the Moon album by Pink Floyd.
Each color has a different wavelength and therefore travels at a different speed. As a result, the colors bend at different angles, which is what makes the white light split into its component parts. Red light slows the least and is therefore diffracted less. At the other end of the spectrum, violet light is slowed down the most and is refracted more. This process of splitting the light is called dispersion. The more refraction there is, the greater the dispersion. Unsurprisingly, diamonds have the highest refractive index, which is why they sparkle with colors.
That splitting of light is usually unwanted in photography. The last thing we need from a lens is it making rainbows. When it happens, we see it as color fringing or chromatic aberration around high-contrast edges. Cheap lenses are prone to this fault. A perfect lens would have no aberrations and all the different wavelengths would converge on a single point on the sensor. To get close to this, lens manufacturers have multiple glass elements within the lens that help bring the different wavelengths together. Modern lens technology is getting constantly better and contemporary professional lenses exhibit no visible aberrations.
Diffraction also occurs as light hits an edge. Imagine ripples on water hitting an obstruction, they will bend around it. The same applies to light.
Stand outside on a bright day and look at your shadow. You will see that the outer edges of it are not quite as dark as the middle. That lighter edge is caused by the light bending around you. Incidentally, that dark part of the shadow is called the umbra, and the lighter edge is the penumbra. The farther from the light source you are, the larger the umbra is in proportion to the penumbra, and the sharper your shadow becomes. That’s something to consider when using flash and studio lights.
With photography, this light-bending effect happens when the photons bounce off and bend around the edges of the aperture blades. The smaller the aperture, the more pronounced that bouncing and bending becomes. That’s because the proportion of diffracted light to un-diffracted light is high at small apertures.
This is why photographers usually avoid the smallest apertures because the increased proportion of diffracted light causes images to be less sharp.
Not only does this bouncing – properly called scattering – occur when light hits boundaries, but also when light encounters other particles. Because blue has shorter wavelengths, it is scattered more easily than red, which is why we see the sky during the day as blue.
As we look toward the horizon, the sky can appear whiter. That is because there is more atmosphere for the blue light to be scattered repeatedly, which removes the blueness. Furthermore, looking obliquely through the atmosphere the extra particles scatter other colors too, plus there’s also the light reflected from the planet’s surface affecting it.
All these factors result in the different wavelengths being mixed again and producing white light. The exception can be over the sea, where the blue of the water is reflected up into the atmosphere turning the low sky blue again.
The scattered light in the sky is polarised. That means that the blue light waves travel in a single direction, as opposed to randomly in all directions. This polarized movement is perpendicular to the light source. Therefore, if you fit a circular polarizing (CPL) filter to your lens, you can cut out much of the light in the sky at 90 degrees to the Sun, making the sky appear darker.
Polarizing filters are great for taking away reflections off the water’s surface, allowing you to see more clearly what lies beneath because the reflection is polarized. You can also remove glare from, say, damp, autumnal leaves, allowing their colors to become richer.
As the sun gets low in the sky, the sunlight must pass through a lot more atmosphere before it reaches you. At low levels, it is filled with dust and water vapor. This scatters the blue light even more and only the reds and oranges get through to our eyes, hence glorious sunsets with warm colors.
When I say warm colors, I mean psychologically warm. We think of reds, oranges, and yellows being warm colors and blues being cold. However, in physics, it’s the other way around. Think of a blacksmith heating a piece of metal. At first, it glows red, then yellow. As it gets hotter it turns a blueish white. A welder’s gas torch is exceptionally hot and can melt steel. It burns blue.
There is a question that I am often asked. Why do photographic sensors and computer screens use red, green, and blue to reproduce colors instead of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet? That is the big difference between science and engineering. It is possible to achieve white by combining just those three colors, which, from an engineering perspective, is the simplest way to achieve the desired result. Finding a means of combining all seven colors of the spectrum on a camera sensor or computer monitor would be complex, and expensive.
However, like everything in photography, there is a compromise. The camera and your computer screen using the three primary colors of red, green, and blue cannot reproduce anything like the range of colors available to our eyes in the real world.
Even that isn’t as simple as it first seems. The range of colors differs depending on the device. Firstly, there is the virtual image, which is the most precise version. It’s what your camera records when shooting raw and what your editing software understands your image to be. Then there is the rather more limited version of colors that appear on your computer monitor, or your camera if you are shooting jpegs. Different again is the version that you are able to print.
What we really want is for these three different ranges to be the same. To do that, we use color management. With color management, we are defining maximum and minimum values for red, green, and blue. Whole books have been written about this, and there’s far too much information to include in this article. However, it is important to know that you should keep your printer, screen, and camera (if you are not shooting raw), set to the same color space.
The most commonly used of these color spaces is sRGB. However, Adobe RGB is another common profile that has more colors available to it and it was the standard for high-end digital printing. ProPhoto RGB has an even wider profile and provides almost all the colors possible for most printers. However, things have changed and the printers I use produce color profiles for each type of print and paper. Those give the highest possible color accuracy.
For most photographers, it is enough to remember to use a color space that is no bigger than the gamut available to your devices.
When we mix projected light, red, green, and blue are primary colours. Combined they produce secondary colors: magenta, cyan, and yellow. This is additive light, so mixing red and green produces yellow. Mixing different proportions of these colored lights will give us the range of colors that the printer can produce.
In comparison, when we use printer inks, they remove or subtract colors from white light. The inks absorb some light and reflect others. When mixing the ink colors of magenta, cyan, and yellow in different proportions with black, we can get another, different range of colors. In color management, that range is known as a gamut.
Using a single color space, we ensure we are only using those colors where the two gamuts overlap. If we tried to view or print colors that were outside the capabilities of your screens or printers, we would get some odd results.
On a related subject, the screen in front of you will have control buttons to change, at the bare minimum, the contrast and brightness. So will everyone else’s. Calibrating your screen is an important step to ensuring your prints’ colors and tones match what you print. Of course, when you share an image online, most other people won’t have calibrated screens. Consequently, your images may appear brighter or darker, with more or less saturation, and different contrast than it should. There is nothing you can do about that. If you are printing photos and want accurate results, or if you are sharing them with other photographers who are likely to have calibrated their screens, then calibrating your screen is essential.
This article is, of course, just scratching the surface of these topics and there is plenty to be learned under each topic I’ve covered. Search the other articles here at Fstoppers, there’s a wealth of knowledge in the 33,000+ articles, some of which look more deeply at the topics I have briefly covered here.
Photographer Chris Porsz hopes this photo will help him finally find a mystery woman and her leaping dog.
“In March 2019 I was sat in the Union Square, New York dog run when I spotted a lady with a pink bag on her hand (to keep her hand clean) throwing a ball to her dog which was sat down facing her. The dog then launched itself and flipped in mid-air to face me and snap,” he said.
“As you can see the lady with her hand on her head was as surprised as me and I think she is saying phew.
“I have searched in vain via the NY media to find the owner so that I can send her a copy.”
FAIRBANKS, Alaska (KTVF) – Seal skin slippers, sun catchers, ivory carvings. These are just a few of the items made by Alaska Natives in the Interior.
Finding ways to purchase their wares can sometimes be a challenge and a local non-profit hopes to change that. Denakkanaaga, which means “voice of our elders” in Koyukon Athabascan, is bridging the gap between indigenous artists and the general public with monthly pop-up sales.
A market featuring moose hide, birch bark baskets, and furs all seem to be an oddity to someone who may have never visited Alaska. Well, these items are actually considered functional art to indigenous people. The local non profit Denakkanaaga recognizes this and regularly helps elders in the Interior to feature their art and also help them sell their unique items.
Diana Sevier, Denakkanaaga Cultural Programs Manager says, “We get to share really more about culture over all and it imbues this greater meaning to the items rather just seeing like oh I see a shirt like well that not’s really just a shirt that’s this clothing item that’s been made for time immemorial.”
Robin Frerichs is originally from Kotzebue and she learned how to bead from her great grandmother. She began to bead for her family, and as her family grew, so did her reputation as a beading artist.
“When they were babies they were in the WEIO baby contest and then they went through JOM dance group doing their regalia’s and stuff and they got into the FNA pageants and WEIO pageants,” said, Frerichs.
Ultimately, these items are far more than meets the eye. Linda Peter, a dancefan and grassfan artist from western Alaska shares that creating traditional items bring her peace. “It brings you back to your ancestors and I feel like I’m talking with my mom and my grandma when I sew baskets.”
Officials with Denakkanaaga say it’s those voices that drive them to help the elders be proud of these one of a kind items that are available. They also say the lessons learned from their past will also help the Indigenous people of the future, that can be seen in every stitch. The Alaska Native Gift Shop is held every month at the Morris Thompson Cultural Center and more information can be found here.
Copyright 2023 KTVF. All rights reserved.
This is The Marshall Project’s Closing Argument newsletter, a weekly deep dive into a key criminal justice issue. Want this delivered to your inbox? Subscribe to future newsletters here.
At first glance, the “Federal Prison Inmate Activity Book” looks like something a child might get at a fast food restaurant. But then you see that the word search puzzle includes terms like “larceny” and “embezzle.” On another page, above drawings of a panda and a one-eyed snake, it reads, “With so many gangs in prison, it’s hard to keep track! Circle the tattoos that might be found on gang members.”
The booklet wasn’t published by a prison; it’s a cheeky collaboration between artist Daniel McCarthy Clifford and an incarcerated person he kept anonymous “to protect them from retaliation,” according to a display card at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in New York City. The center is currently showing “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” an exhibit curated by New York University professor Nicole Fleetwood. It has toured several museums since 2020 and is one of at least four exhibits in New York this year that feature artists with prison experiences, along with similar shows in Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Michigan, New Mexico and Wisconsin.
Together, they suggest a renaissance — not of prison art, which is probably as old as prisons, but of its public reception. Americans seem collectively more eager to engage with this work, and to understand the processes and experiences behind it. The visual counterpart to the music I covered in collaboration with The New York Times last week, prison art can convey the experiences of confinement, trauma and redemption, in ways that transcend words alone.
Much of the art in these new exhibits employs hard-earned virtuosity in the service of social commentary, from Mark Loughney’s drawings of his fellow prisoners to Jesse Krimes’ psychedelic quilts to Gilberto Rivera’s three-dimensional smears of paint and prison uniforms. But Clifford’s activity book stuck with me precisely because it isn’t a technical marvel. As with Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal, your first reaction might be to laugh at its simplicity and irreverence. Clifford tried to send the booklets to federal prisons, but administrators rejected them as a security threat. So the object in the museum is imbued with the absurdities of censorship, especially when you consider that some prisons are letting in Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”
With volume comes variety. For all the artists who show us prison’s horrors, others put playfulness and joy in the foreground. Native American artist Henry Frank constructed a bustling, miniature prison visitation room out of LEGO toys. After a childhood spent visiting her father in prison, sculptor Sable Elyse Smith used institutional stools and tables to assemble a structure that wouldn’t be out of place on a playground, showing how a child’s gaze can thwart the austerity of a visitation room, while also underscoring the effect of incarceration on loved ones on the outside. The Hollywood Reporter recently described Anthony Gomez’s mockumentary shorts as inspired by “The Office,” while NPR noted Sherrill Roland’s use of Kool-Aid in his sculptures.
Not all the artists make work that is directly about their physical circumstances, and some curators encourage them to go beyond “genres of traditional prison art.” “You have to actively seek new visual stimulation, or you’ll get stuck with the same old prison images, tears, bars, cement blocks, the very, very prison-like things,” Johnny Van Patten, a formerly incarcerated artist in Michigan, told Colossal earlier this year.
Still, most art signals the time spent making it. When you look at an eagle made of tiny folded magazine pages, or a miniature travel trailer made of teabags, cigarette foil and soda cans, it’s impossible not to think of these artists’ particular relationship to hours, weeks and years. “They are navigating endless penal time, scheduled by others, while mourning the loss of domestic time — family time, home time, free time,” Leslie Jamison wrote in The Atlantic when “Marking Time” debuted.
While museums are increasingly interested in showing this art (and there are more opportunities for collectors to buy it), many prisons still try to keep it inside. Several years ago, the Trump administration banned Guantánamo Bay prisoners from taking their art with them upon release. The Biden administration lifted the ban. Earlier this summer, New York state officials considered new restrictions on prison art, along with writing, music, and other creative work, which they scrapped after public outcry. But many states still try to bar artists from making money from their work, which can be a way to pay for the high cost of phone calls and commissary items.
Even when prison art reaches the public, there is no guarantee it will spark mercy. Earlier this summer, lawyers for Michael Tisius published his art as part of a campaign to stop his execution, arguing that he’d transformed himself on death row, since killing two jail guards in 2000.
The nature of prison art, like all art, is that its effects are impossible to predict and go far beyond the artist. Tisius was executed in June, but his murals still fill the walls of a Missouri prison. He wanted “to brighten [the] environment,” he said in his clemency application, and “erase some of the darkness of my past and to bring some beauty to this world, while I can.”
