New apps, new social media platform updates, new gear. There’s always something new coming at photographers. It’s so easy to be caught up in all that’s new, that sometimes we forget about the perfectly good tools we already have.

That was the case for me recently, until I started doing a task that most of us dread: dumping a few years of photos off my smartphone to my computer storage. There were some key photos from vacations past that I wanted to adjust, but when you’re offloading thousands of photos at midnight, the thought of some tedious touch-up work doesn’t sound too great.

That’s when I thought about my old friend Radiant Photo.

I dragged a photo into the interface, waited 3 seconds for the magic to happen, made another quick adjustment, and began exporting the photo out. Total elapsed time was 8 seconds. Specifically, I used the winter landscape preset and made a sky adjustment. The end result was a sharper photo that more accurately resembled the crisp, cool, wintry setting around Neuschwanstein Castle.

Radiant Photo is great at detailed editing, but we forget that it can help us out in a pinch. Photographers are just like everyone else; we wait until we have way too many photos to go through. But that’s OK, we have tools that can make great decisions on their own to make us more efficient. Keep that in mind.

Check out our Radiant Photo archive to find out more about what you can do with this software.

The striking collection of photographic art presented in the Carnegie Museum of Art’s Widening the Lens is very much a revision of the long tradition of landscape photography in the US. It may be very directly revising – as in AK Burns’s reinvention of landscape photographs literally ripped from photo books – or it may be much more subtly so, as with Sam Contis’s careful deconstructions of the iconography of the American west. However so, this is a show very much about counter-narratives, hidden histories, reinscription, reinvention, and revision.

Borne of a desire to consider how our relationship with images has shifted as photography has become shockingly more ubiquitous and prolific, Widening the Lens looks at photographs both as singular objects as well as pieces integrated into larger objects. It is a show that strives to be responsive to how the lines between photography and other artistic media have become blurred, and one that seeks to imagine what environmental photography looks like now.

Appropriate to this long look at imagery and landscape, Widening the Lens is grouped into four major through lines: colonial legacies, landscape as a memorial site, human adaptability and mobility, and environmental anxiety. These themes take us temporally through the past, present and future, and they offer useful ways to draw interconnections between the sometimes cacophonous array of artwork brought together for this exhibition. “We’re trying to tell these stories that have both happened in history,” said Dan Leers, exhibition curator, “but also hopefully charting some possible courses forward for humanity.”

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Examining Xaviera Simmons’s Sundown series, named for so-called sundown towns, which become extremely unsafe for African Americans after dark, one finds self-portraits in which the artist inhabits a carefully arranged tableaux of elements that conjures landscapes where Black people were exploited. In each, she holds up various images toward the camera, inviting us to imagine how the imagistic history of the United States has shaped the identities of her subjects. One such images reads: “The myth of the American Frontier still shapes US racial divides,” suggesting that the deep history of the American landscape and its representation is still very live in contemporary struggles over inequality.

One standout collection from the show are photographs taken from Justine Kurland’s now 20-year-old series Girl Pictures. In it, Kurland envisions a world of teenage girl runaways in which her protagonists are seen boldly transiting through various natural landscapes, both wildernesses and liminal zones at the edges of urban areas. It is a narrative of how these girls might transit the land in a world much different and much safer for them to grow up in.

“It’a not documentary, not a re-enactment, it’s about using photography to build a world that seemed more equitable and just,” Kurland told me. She shared that part of the drive to create Girl Pictures came out of the problematic history of landscape photography, where the camera – most often held my a male photographer – has been used to conquer and dominate. By contrast. she aimed to create a landscape that the girls were not seen as settling into, but rather one in which the landscape was holding them, offering a sense of interdependency.

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The photos in Girl Pictures are first striking for the simple beauty that Kurland finds in the landscapes; her iconography comes across as gentle and intimate, these places seen more in bite-sized chunks where the girls can find moments of refuge, connection, strength, and play. Forest, in particular, with the two large tree trunks that frame the image, offering a place of restfulness and connection for the girls, and with the gentle layers of light drifting off into the background depths, creates a feeling of peace and harmony, very much suggesting the holding that Kurland wants her landscapes to be doing.

“Even though Kurland’s images are some of the earliest photographs in the show,” Leers told me, “these photos feel so present and contemporary in so many ways. They’re what a world might look like populated by strong, young, independent women. It’s really exciting.” The selections from Girl Pictures are easily one of the standout groupings from Widening the Lens, and a strong reason in and of themselves to see this exhibition.

Lucy Raven’s shadowgrams, which were made by firing objects filled with magnesium, aluminum and gravel at pieces of photosensitive paper, come across as mysterious and somewhat opaque. (It was probably not lost on Raven that shadowgrams were used to advance weapons and flight technologies, two key components in subduing the west.) These pieces are a very different take on the photographic medium, one that challenges the idea of representation itself, and that pushes Widening the Lens into very different territory.

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Another aspect of Widening the Lens is the six-part podcast that will be released in conjunction with it. Based around themes like myth-making, dominion and impressions, the podcast welcomes guests including artists, curators, geologists, film-makers, writers, poets and more. It’s hosted by tennis great Venus Williams, whom Leers explained was picked after a lengthy search for the perfect individual to partner with. “We wanted someone with a broader reach,” he shared. “In conversation with Williams and her team, we understood she’s very deeply engaged with the contemporary arts world. She’s very engaged in thinking about the role that arts can play.”

The podcast is a part of a wider ambition taken on by the Carnegie Museum of Art to engage with audiences who might never make it through the museum’s doors to attend Widening the Lens in person. According to Leers, these goals had been sparked by the period of disconnect during the Covid shutdown. “We need to be more responsive in meeting our audiences where they are,” he said. “We want to give everyone a chance to try and engage with all of our projects.”

Widening the Lens is a very diverse body of work, almost imbuing the show with a kind of “everything but the kitchen sink” feeling, and its capaciousness and openness feels very appropriate for an exhibition trying to re-examine the rules for the American landscape. It is also very much one that is about wondering how our pasts, both longer and more recent, will continue to evolve forward into the future. It is Leers’s hope that anyone who visits Widening the Lens will take some time to consider the question of impacts, and let that inform their actions in the future. “I hope audiences might think for even one extra second how their actions today are going to impact my surroundings now and in the future,” Leers said. “I hope they’ll understand that those impacts can magnify, expand, resonate in the future.”

• Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape is now on display at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pennsylvania until 12 January 2025

Kirstie Marie, Cowgirl 30 Under 30 alumn, has a real life unicorn on her hands! Kirstie mainly rides Ruf N Tuf Cocktail, a 2017 gelding by Wimpyneedsacocktail, bareback but has occasionally shown him in ranch versatility events. He also enjoys modeling for her business, Kirstie Marie Photography. He is featured on a billboard in Tioga for Dennards and 100x Equine, appears on two feed bags for Standlee Forage, and is wrapped on a trailer for EM Custom Show Pads.

Kirstie said, “We bought him in 2021 as a roping prospect for my husband, a horse to teach my young daughter how to ride, and a horse for me to enjoy. I grew up riding as a child, showed competitively as a youth, and then rode on scholarship for TCU’s women’s equestrian team. After college, I entered my “horseless horse girl” era and started my equine portrait photography business to fill the void. Since I didn’t have a horse to ride myself, The photography business allowed me to pet pretty horses each day and live vicariously through my clients. Mojo was the first horse I owned as an adult, and my first horse to own in 10 years. He quickly became the unicorn of our dreams! At His first ever horse show ever, his first class was the leadline with my daughter. Over the next year he went on to win nearly $30,000 in ARHFA and Riata Buckle roping events.”

INDIANA (WTHI) – The Indiana State Department of Agriculture is hosting a photography contest this summer. It’s asking for Hoosier photographers to submit pictures of all things “agriculture”. The contest was created to recognize the hard work and dedication of Indiana’s farmers.

“Each and every Hoosier is welcome to submit an entry to the contest,” said Lt. Gov. Suzanne Crouch, Indiana’s Secretary of Agriculture and Rural Development. “No matter the camera equipment you own, we encourage you to submit your best images showcasing Indiana agriculture.”

There are several categories to which you can submit photos.

• On the Farm: Showcasing any building, piece of equipment or activity that is a part of life on an Indiana farm.
• Faces of Agriculture: Featuring those who grow and produce food, fuel and fiber in Indiana.
• Agritourism: Spotlighting Indiana’s seasonal and agricultural destinations, such as orchards, wineries and farmers markets.
• Conservation: Highlighting Indiana’s natural beauty with landscapes, water and wildlife.

Ten winners will be selected and invited to attend a special ceremony at the Indiana State Fair. Contest winners will also have their photographs featured in the offices of the Lt. Governor’s Family of Business in Indianapolis throughout the year.

Contestants can submit up to five photos in digital format accommodated by a submission form for each photo. Photos will be evaluated based on creativity, composition and category representation. Entries must be submitted by 5:00 p.m. (ET) on June 30, 2024.

Click here for entry forms, guidelines and criteria.

Elusive, crystallized in a fleeting moment in time—undefined. This is the impression we get when examining the shots of Charlie Tallott, winner of the Photo London X Nikon Emerging Photographer Award. At Least Until The World Stops Going Around is a project—also turned into a book—that was born during an extremely dramatic period for the photographer. Through photography, Tallott has undoubtedly found a way to tell his story, albeit indirectly, and to show us even the darkest sides of his personal experiences.

Dopo un ricovero lungo tre mesi si è rifugiato quindi nelle immagini seguendo il mantra ripetutogli dalla madre: «hai sempre domani», molto simile a «il sole sorgerà anche domani». Il percorso seguito da Tallott, nel corso della realizzazione di questo progetto, sembra non seguire una linea specifica e come il fotografo stesso spiega al The Guardian che «non c’è una correlazione tra queste cose, ma suppongo che sia più la sensazione del fotografo che sarà sempre imposto sulle immagini in qualche modo. Immagino che si possa vedere la mia impronta attraverso tutto». La presenza di Charlie Tallott sembra trasparire quindi dal carico emozionale che portano con sé questi scatti; l’aggressività del flash e il metodo non raccontano il mondo esterno ma quello che accade nella testa del fotografo.

After a three-month hospitalization, he sought refuge in images, following the mantra his mother repeated to him: «you always have tomorrow,» very similar to «the sun will rise again tomorrow.» The path Tallott followed in the course of creating this project does not seem to follow a specific line, and as the photographer himself explains to The Guardian, «there is no correlation between these things, but I suppose it’s more the feeling of the photographer that will always be imposed on the images somehow. I guess you can see my imprint throughout it all.» Charlie Tallott’s presence thus seems to emerge from the emotional weight these shots carry; the aggressiveness of the flash and the method do not tell the external world but what is happening in the photographer’s mind.

courtesy Charlie Tallott