Fostoria received a new permanent sculpture Friday at the intersection of Tiffin and Main streets.
New sculpture takes residency
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Former City Grocery Manager; Artist Jimmy Weems Died Saturday
Jimmy Weems, general manager at City Grocery for more than 25 years, died Saturday at his home in Oxford. Visitation for James Lewis “Jimmy” Weems, 70, will be held from 4:30 to 6 p.m. on Wednesday in the West Hall of Waller Funeral Home. Weems graduated from Lexington High School, where he played many sports, […]
Wildflower Photography: Tips to Capture the California Superbloom
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Capturing wildflowers can be an incredibly enriching experience that allows you to immerse yourself in the vibrant colors, delicate petals, and the intoxicating scent of nature in full bloom.
However, it can be challenging to find the right approach to truly capture the essence and beauty of these ephemeral wonders. There are a few techniques that I love to use to really get the most out of wildflower photography, and I used them specifically to create a new series capturing the superbloom. Here are my three favorites.
Technique 1: Painterly Intimates
Using a telephoto lens to compress the scene and focus on small details of the landscape is a technique I love. It allows you to showcase the ridges of the hills and capture different color patterns. This type of photography requires slowing down and analyzing the scene to identify unique patterns and structures.
If a composition doesn’t immediately inspire you, don’t give up. Your initial test shots may not be portfolio-worthy. If using the telephoto lens feels overwhelming, start wide and gradually zoom in, exploring intriguing shapes and areas.
Technique 2: The ULTRA Wide
To emphasize the beautiful shapes of the flowers, try getting up close with a wide-angle lens. This technique offers a surreal perspective on landscapes. While it may not resonate with everyone, I personally enjoy magnifying tiny flowers within the frame. To capture these types of images effectively, include a focal point or background subject for the flowers to lead up to, such as trees, rock formations, or mountains.
When getting extremely close to the flowers, consider focus stacking—capturing multiple images at different focal points and then merging them. Use a higher aperture like f/16 to minimize the number of images needed. Focus stacking can be done in software like Lightroom, Luminar, or dedicated programs like Helicon.
Helicon is by far the best in my experience. Be mindful of wind conditions, as it can make focus stacking challenging almost impossible. If the flowers are swaying, wait for a moment of stillness to take your stack. Or if the wind does not subside, pull your camera back to capture fewer images. With larger flowers like lupine, focus stacking may not be necessary to showcase their beautiful shape.
Technique 3: Aerial Photography
Capturing wildflowers from above offers a unique perspective of the flowers. You can of course shoot grand landscapes from above, like below. But my personal favorite technique is to aim the camera straight down. This provides an abstract and textured view of the flowers. Move the drone around in different positions to isolate shapes and sections. I am always looking for symmetry, repetition of shapes and different color arrangements.
I hope some of these tips are helpful and if you haven’t tried one of them I highly recommend it. Play around and see which ones resonate with you the most.
About the Author: Michael Shainblum is a photographer, filmmaker, and educator based in San Francisco, California. He has been working professionally as a photographer and filmmaker for 17 years since the age of 16. He has been commissioned by clients such as Disney, Nike, Samsung, Apple, and Google. He also shares his knowledge via his Youtube Channel, Instagram, and workshops.
Setting the Barré: Talking Hospitality Photography with Brandon Barré
When it comes to capturing bold, dramatic, luminous architectural images, Brandon Barré is in a league of his own. Known for photographing some of the swankiest projects on Earth, Brandon doesn’t just rely on fancy spaces to create his incredible photographs; his perfect composition, dramatic lighting and meticulous staging and attention to detail results in images that we can all draw inspiration from.
Based in Toronto but working globally, Brandon recently returned from a marathon of a photoshoot for the Atlantis Dubai where he captured over 260 images throughout the span of a few months.
In this interview, Brandon and I dive into his illustrious career as an architecture and hospitality photographer and discuss his process, techniques and business practices.
Huge thanks to Brandon for taking the time to chat with me and for sharing his knowledge and experience with all of us at APAlmanac.
To see and drool over Brandon’s work, visit his website, his Instagram @brandon_barre and check out this Project of the Week by Lexi Taciak.
First Major Retrospective of Mohawk Artist Shelley Niro’s Work To Go
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York will host “Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch,” the first major retrospective of work by the multimedia artist Shelley Niro (Six Nations Reserve, Bay of Quinte Mohawk, Turtle Clan, b. 1954). For more than 50 years, Niro has been creating art building upon Kanyen’kehá:ka (Mohawk) philosophies, deep understandings of history and a woman-centered worldview. The exhibition will be open May 27 through Jan. 1, 2024.
Accessible, humorous and peppered with references to popular culture, Niro’s art delves into the timeless cultural knowledge and generational histories of her Six Nations Kanyen’kehá:ka community to provide purpose and healing. Niro employs a wide variety of art practices in her work, including paintings, photographs, mixed-media works and films. The exhibition is divided into four sections titled: Memory, Matriarchy, Actors and Relations. Each provides vantage points from which Niro probes ideas central to her experience and identity as a Mohawk woman, such as the story of Sky Woman, the gender roles and stereotypes imposed on her culture by patriarchal settler culture and the persistence of Haudenosaunee matrilineal culture.
The exhibition is curated by David W. Penney, associate director of museum scholarship at the National Museum of the American Indian; Melissa Bennett, senior curator of contemporary art at the Art Gallery of Hamilton; and Greg Hill, multidisciplinary artist, curator and art consultant.
“Shelley Niro employs humor and wit to probe the joy, sorrow and contradictions of Indigenous existence, and she delivers hard truths with a smile,” said Cynthia Chavez Lamar (San Felipe Pueblo, Hopi, Tewa and Navajo), director of the National Museum of the American Indian. “Her inclusion of Native people, including family members, in much of her work, allows us to see Indigeneity in its complexity while also addressing themes of empowerment, matrilineal kinship and dispossession. The museum is very pleased to celebrate Niro’s art through this exhibition.”
Media Preview
A media preview is scheduled for Thursday, May 25, 9–11 a.m. To attend, member of the media should send an email to nmaipressoffice@si.edu.
Program
On Saturday, June 17, at 1 p.m., the museum will host a special screening of Niro’s latest feature-length film, Café Daughter (Canada, 2023). The film is based on a play by Kenneth T. Williams about retired Canadian Senator Lillian Dyck, the first Aboriginal senator and first Chinese senator. It tells the story of Yvette Wong, a young Chinese-Cree girl who tries to find her place in a small Saskatchewan town in the 1960s. The screening will be followed by a conversation with Niro.
Catalog
The accompanying exhibition catalog is published by the Art Gallery of Hamilton and the National Museum of the American Indian. It brings together 215 reproductions from Niro’s expansive oeuvre, including work published for the first time. Also included in the career retrospective are three major essays about Niro’s work by the exhibition’s curators Bennett, Hill and Penney, as well as texts from seven guest artists, scholars and curators.
Exhibition Tour
After the presentation at the National Museum of the American Indian, an expanded version of the exhibition will embark on a multiyear tour organized by the Art Gallery of Hamilton. Upcoming Canadian tour dates:
- Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton Ontario; Feb. 10–May 26, 2024
- National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario; June 14–Aug. 18, 2024
- Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia; Sept. 21, 2024–Feb. 2, 2025
- Remai Modern, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan; spring 2025
Acknowledgements
Organized and circulated by the Art Gallery of Hamilton with the National Museum of the American Indian and with curatorial support from the National Gallery of Canada. Major support for the project is provided by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Terra Foundation for American Art, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative Pool. This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
About the National Museum of the American Indian
In partnership with Native peoples and their allies, the National Museum of the American Indian fosters a richer shared human experience through a more informed understanding of Native peoples. The museum strives toward equity and social justice for the Native peoples of the Western Hemisphere through education, inspiration and empowerment. Through two locations, it features exhibitions and programs in New York City and the National Mall in Washington, D.C. For additional information, including hours and directions, visit AmericanIndian.si.edu. Follow the museum via social media on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
About the Art Gallery of Hamilton
Founded in 1914, the Art Gallery of Hamilton is the oldest and largest public art gallery in southwestern Ontario. Its permanent collection, which is focused on historical Canadian, 19th-century European, and International and Contemporary art, numbers more than 10,000 works and is recognized as one of Canada’s finest. The AGH is a vital creative hub and centre of lifelong learning that enables people of all ages to enrich their lives by gaining a deeper understanding of art. To learn more about the AGH, visit the gallery online at artgalleryofhamilton.com, or connect on social media on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.
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Photographer’s ‘Stellar Flower’ Shows Night Sky Changes in 360 Degrees
A creative photographer used ancient and mythical rocks as the basis of a 360-degree “stellar flower” image that shows the passage of day into night and the setting of Venus and the Moon.
Dario Giannobile created Twilight in a Flower by amalgamating two well-known landscape photography techniques — timelapse star trails and little planet.
Giannobile tells PetaPixel that as far as he knows, it is a new technique that he is the first to develop which he calls a stellar flower.
“In the star trail, the merging of multiple images into a single frame allows the apparent movement of the stars to be reconstructed during the night, crystallizing the passage of time into a single story where the scenery is normally unchanged,” explains Giannobile.
“In a little planet, however, a 360-degree landscape view is presented by reshaping it into the shape of a small globe. It is formed from the original image through a distortion that, for simplicity, we will call circular.
“This is how the stellar flower came to life from these two fundamental elements: the visualization in a single frame of the passage of time typical of star trails and the 360-degree visualization typical of little planet.”
Creating the Stellar Flower
Giannobile chose Argimusco’s Rocks in Sicily, Italy as his location. Dubbed the Sicilian Stonehenge, it’s speculated the megaliths were a site for sacred rites or a place for astronomical observations for the people of antiquity.
The landscape, and two rocks in particular, served as the basis for the photographer’s stellar flower image — with the 360-degree technique transforming the rocks into flower petals.
“By recording the passage of time (more or less half an hour) and the transition from twilight to night, it was possible to create a new star flower,” explains Giannobile.
“The image is composed of 16 individual photographs. The rocks of Argimusco have distorted forming a double sequence of petals.
“By combining the almost linear trajectory of the setting of Venus and the Moon with the circular distortion of the image, a sequence is obtained that takes the form of a spiral that winds around itself twice.
“The first rotation is given by Venus, the second by the Moon until it disappears behind the large rock.”
Giannobile used a Canon 6D with a Sigma 24-35mm attached in aperture priority mode. He varied the ISO “in order to maintain a homogeneous exposure and control the exposure times to avoid recording the movement of the stars.”
NASA picked the impressive shot for its Astronomy Picture of the Day feature. More of Giannobile’s work can be seen on his Instagram and his website.
Image credits: All photos by Dario Giannobile.
Robert Capa Photography Exhibition Shows AI Can’t Replace the Human Eye
Innocean Berlin has launched a new campaign to promote the world’s first permanent exhibition of photography by the legendary Robert Capa.
The campaign, created for the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Centre in Budapest, takes a fresh perspective on the conversation gripping the creative world right now: AI generated images.
Innocean has produced a series of images contrasting the powerful photographs taken by Robert with versions produced by an AI image generator which is fed a description of the original photo.
Robert’s celebrated photo of a shaved woman being followed by a police officer and a huge crowd during WW2 is placed alongside a poorly executed version generated using AI. Other famous Robert shots are also placed next to clumsy AI-generated versions. Each image ends with the line: “Machines don’t see the world as humans do.”
Hungarian-American war photographer and photojournalist Robert Capa is considered one of the greatest photojournalists of all time. He once said: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough”. Robert believed that the photographer’s mission was to be right next to the action, witnessing life.
The campaign leans into this belief, highlighting the importance of the human eye and the photographer’s interaction with real-life situations – something AI can never replicate. While some see AI as the future of image generation, the campaign aims to demonstrate that the value of human photography outweighs the benefits offered by this technology.
Robert was the only photographers landing with the first wave of troops on Omaha Beach to document D-Day and throughout his career he captured extraordinary images of combat, producing images of the Spanish Civil War, Chinese resistance to Japan and World War II as well as events including the founding of Israel in 1948, the first Indochina war and documenting film productions.
The ad campaign launches on May 22nd in Europe, predominantly in Hungary, and the exhibition launches on June 6th at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Centre in Budapest.
István Virágvölgyi, Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Centre artistic director, said, “While we are always excited by the emergence of new imaging technologies, the consequences of the introduction of artificial intelligence seem unpredictable and somewhat worrying. Nevertheless, we are certain that machines will not be able to replace the kind of human vision that the great photojournalist Robert Capa embraced to passionately witness and report on important events in the world. We believe that it will always be more engaging to talk to a human being than a robot, and that a photograph taken by a real person will give us more insight into the human experience than AI-generated images.”
Ricardo Wolff, executive creative director at Innocean Berlin, said, “Robert was the first photographer at the D-Day landing due to his courage and his passion, two adjectives that set humans apart from any sort of artificial intelligence. And that’s the truth we’re clinging onto to launch this campaign: nothing beats the human experience. We’re extremely honoured to help our colleagues at RCCP in this historical moment.”
Artist to install public sculpture at COA
BAR HARBOR — Acclaimed artist Andy Goldsworthy will be at College of the Atlantic this summer to install Road Line, his first permanent artwork in Maine. Goldsworthy is renowned for
The Killers of the Flower Moon Cast Spotlighted Indigenous Design at Cannes
It all began on Saturday at the film’s world premiere. Gladstone, whose performance in the film has been widely praised, took to the red carpet in a floral-print Valentino gown, which she punctuated with a pair of dentalium shell earrings from Luiseño and Shoshone-Bannock designer Jamie Okuma, finished with antique glass seed beads, diamond beads, gold, and brain-tanned deer hide (the artist, who hails from the La Jolla Indian Reservation in California, recently became a CFDA member). “I’m so incredibly honored she chose to wear [my earrings] for such a significantly important day for her,” Okuma tells Vogue. “She was able to have that little bit of home, culturally speaking, walk her down the red carpet.”
Gladstone has continued to wear jewelry by Native designers. For the film’s after-party on Saturday, the actor wore a classic black gown with a copper cuff, earrings, and neck plate by Tlingit artist Jennifer Younger. For the film’s photo call on Sunday, Gladstone wore a black caped Chanel ensemble, and again accessorized with Indigenous jewels—this time, a pair of beaded and dentalium earrings by Shelby LeeAnn Gorman. For many of these spotlighted designers, it’s been completely surreal to see their work on an international stage like Cannes. “This has been my dream, to see Tlingit formline design shared on a large platform like this,” Younger tells Vogue. “I hope more people are drawn in to Northwest Coast art when they see my pieces, and they find that the art form is thriving with many amazing Indigenous artists.”
Lily Gladstone in Chanel and Shelby LeeAnn Gorman earringsPhoto: Getty Images
Lily Gladstone in a Jennifer Younger necklacePhoto: Getty Images
Earringas by Jamie Okuma, worn by Lily GladstonePhoto: Courtesy of Jamie Okuma
Native American leaders pushing to strengthen protection for arts
WASHINGTON — Native American artists say they continue to struggle with the theft of their work, and tribal leaders are urging Congress to strengthen the Indian Arts and Crafts Act.
IACA was passed in 1990 to prohibit any advertisement and all sales of counterfeit Indian arts and crafts. Choctaw Nation artist D.G. Smalling says the IACA must adapt to the new ways of buying and selling art through online sales.
“We have just a very different kind of engagement with intellectual property now,” Smalling said. “This is why my principal attorney is an expert in intellectual property. It is to defend what I create and to defend what is mine.”
Cherokee Nation Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. urged Congress to strengthen the IACA during the recent Cherokee Days in Washington D.C.
He is working with members of Congress on a proposed ARTIST Act of 2023 (Amendments to Respect Traditional Indigenous Skill and Talent).
“We haven’t engaged the delegation just yet,” Hoskin said. “We will be setting up some opportunities to visit with them. The Senate Committee on Indian Affairs is where this matter sits at the moment. The chair of that committee is Chairman (Brian) Schatz of Hawaii and he and ranking member Sen. (Lisa) Murkowski have asked for input on the ARTIST Act, so that is the particular forum through which we are channeling our advocacy.”
The proposed legislation would increase and expand protections on Indian arts and crafts, as well as enforce stricter punishments for those who are selling or making counterfeit goods which could lead to being arrested for the crimes. These counterfeit items are often recreated by non-Indian artists or printed off and seen on portraits, shirts, mugs, online shops and many other places throughout the world.
“The law must be changed in order to protect actual Cherokee artists, artisans, and craftspeople – those who are citizens of one of the three federally-recognized Cherokee tribes – and ensure their arts and crafts are the only works permitted to be presented as Cherokee,” Hoskin wrote in a March 29 letter to the Indian Affairs Committee.
Smalling is supportive of Hoskin and other tribal leaders as they push for change.
“They are asking that the law and the act can be adapted for our time and we need to cover all things that are digital, all things that are traditional and analog and we need to have a much more robust set of laws that can then be used to act against those who are chronic violators who profit off of theft,” Smalling said.
“I stand 100% with Chief Hoskin and the other tribal leaders who are seeking to defend our right to our own identity on our own terms.”
Gaylord News is a reporting project of the University of Oklahoma Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication. For more stories by Gaylord News go to GaylordNews.net.
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