It is hoped the art will remind visitors to be careful of the nesting birds on the ground.
Bird sculptures installed in Somerset nature reserve
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Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding photographer reveals their secrets
May 21, 2023 02:00 PM IST
The couple first met in the summer of 2016 after being set up by a mutual friend.
When Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s engagement and wedding photographer received a call to cover the ceremony, he thought it was a prank. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex married at St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle on May 19, 2018.
Read more: Prince Harry’s 10-word comment about Meghan Markle after first date: Book
The couple first met in the summer of 2016 after being set up by a mutual friend. Then in November 2017, Harry proposed to Meghan, before the couple married six months later.
Professional photographer Alexi Lubomirski thought he was being pranked when he received a call to shoot their engagement photos.
“When I got off the phone, I said, ‘I think Kensington Palace just called me?’ Two days later I was sitting in front of Harry and Meghan talking concepts,” he said.
Read more: Meghan Markle is ‘obsessed’ with Diana, her sister says on New York ‘car chase’
The British photographer said he was inspired by an iconic photoshoot of Audrey Hepburn’s husband Mel Ferrer wrapping her in his coat and asked Prince Harry to do the same with Meghan Markle.
“It just popped in my head because I saw his overcoat and I said, ‘Can you put that on?’ And then everything just starts folding together,” the photographer said. In one photo from the shoot, Meghan is all smiles as she shows her engagement ring.
Matthew Day Jackson: ‘I want digital and analogue to fit together perfectly so we can regain our hands’
American artist-designer Matthew Day Jackson’s new show ‘Against Nature’ at Pace Gallery, New York offers a sharp digital spin on landscape painting
Living Treasure Anthony Lovato carves one-of-a-kind pieces inspired by his beloved culture
Jewelry artist Anthony Lovato (Kewa/Santo Domingo Pueblo) pours molten silver into carved tufa casts to conjure glittering symbols of his beloved culture.
That work can be found in “Down Home,” open at the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture to celebrate his winning the 2023 Living Treasure award. Lovato also will be selling his pieces at the annual Native Treasures Art Market taking place Memorial Day weekend, Friday, May 26, through Sunday, May 28, at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center. About 185 artists will be selling jewelry, pottery, weavings, sculpture, paintings, fashion and photography.
Jewelry flowed through Lovato’s DNA. His grandfather, father and brother all made it.
“I was set up for this,” he said. “I’m a fourth generation jeweler.
“Santo Domingo is known for its arts and crafts,” he continued, “all the way back to Chaco Canyon. Of course, they found jewelry back there, so personal adornment has always been there for the pueblo.”
A graduate of Bernalillo High School, Lovato attended Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts, where he focused on metalwork and museum studies. He also worked at the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff in exhibition design.
“I always knew the processes of my work, but I wanted to go back to school to learn more technique,” he said.
His trademark corn, horse and hand motifs river back to the petroglyphs and ancient sites such as Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde.
Horses date back to the Spanish invasion, Lovato said.
“We used to have 14 horses. Now we’re down to eight,” he said. “Some Spanish things have been incorporated into our culture.”
“Corn is my clan sign,” Lovato continued. “The hand denotes human presence.”
He does not draw out his designs. First he travels 300 miles west onto the Hopi Tribe reservation in Arizona to harvest the tufa sandstone.
“I pull it out of the ground myself,” Lovato said.
He slices the tufa into Cracker Jack-sized boxes with a hand saw.
“We carve a design into the sandstone,” he said. “Then we pour molten silver into the block.”
It cools in five minutes.
“Carving it takes more than a day,” Lovato said. “The best part is it relates to pueblo history. People say my pieces talk to them. I say I talk to them so they can talk to people.”
He creates no multiples; everything is one-of-a-kind.
The necklace “Corn Clan Child” shows a mother cradling her child while carrying a pueblo pot on her head. The baby is made of citrine. The pottery symbolizes growth and nourishment.
“Cosmic Corn,” another necklace, nods to Lovato’s clan with stalks of corn and night sky symbols.
“That’s a whole celestial scene, with the stars and the moon and the clouds,” he said. “I refer back to what we know. At Chaco, there are paintings of Halley’s Comet. I’m also fascinated by what the archaeologists found in those areas. It’s all there; I just put it all together like a cook. I put things in silver while my ancestors put it in rock.”
At first, a gold corn ring seems like an anomaly. But Lovato calls it a “happy ring.”
A divorced customer asked him to turn an old wedding ring into something new.
“I’m a jewelry surgeon, I guess,” Lovato said. “I kind of know what people are looking for. They’re looking for their spirit that they’ve lost.”
Major art markets have showered Lovato with awards, including the Santa Fe Indian Market, the Red Earth Nation Show, the Eight Northern Indian Pueblos show, the Heard Museum Guild Indian Market and more. A fourth generation jeweler, he cites his major influences as Allan Houser, Charles Loloma, his grandfather Leo Coriz and his mother Mary Coriz Lovato.
UNM Art Museum to receive grant, prints from Helen Frankenthaler Foundation
As one of 10 university art museums selected, the UNM Art Museum will receive a group of Helen Frankenthaler prints and a one-time grant.
AI: Can you tell that these ‘photographs’ are artificial?
NIGHT CAFEWhether it be artwork, literature, music or photography, content created by artificial intelligence (AI) is on the rise.
So advanced is the content being generated that it is becoming increasingly difficult to determine what is real and what is artificial.
All of these images have been created using AI software on the website Night Cafe.
None of the people depicted are real and each picture has been generated by a text prompt.
A text prompt can be something as simple as “woman shouting” or “twins”.
The potential pitfalls of such content were recently demonstrated when German artist Boris Eldagsen entered this year’s Sony World Photography Award with an AI-generated image and won.
Mr Eldagsen refused the award and stated he was just being a “cheeky monkey” to see if any of the judges “knew or suspected that [the image] was AI-generated”.
“AI images and photography should not compete with each other in an award like this,” he added.
Night Cafe founder Angus Russell said: “Five years ago, People were saying AI would take over the borings jobs, but things that require creativity will be safe for a long time.
“But it’s turned out the exact opposite. Creative jobs and knowledge-based work could be the earliest things to be replaced.”
BBC News picture editor Phil Coomes said that while fake or manipulated images were “nothing new”, the growth of AI would “produce some challenges”.
“There are tools out there that can help us spot images that have been manipulated,” he said.
“And these can help with AI too.
“But these are not fool proof, of course, and much still relies on close visual examination of the picture.”
Dr David Gyimah is an associate professor of innovation at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism and is impressed by the hyper-realism of these images.
“Everything that you would expect of a good photograph is there,” he said.
“There’s nothing in these in these images that could lead you to believe that they were generated in any other way [such as AI].”
Dr Gyimah thinks it is worth considering the potential ill-intentioned uses of AI imagery in journalism and factual content.
“We’ve sort of entered a territory where technology has raced ahead of policy frameworks. And that leaves us in very precarious positions,” he said.
“It can be used for real maleficent purposes, [and] there may well have to be sanctions.
“Otherwise, how do you enforce people not to use images which they purposefully know are not generated by a camera? So therefore may spur different narratives to the ones that are real as opposed to the ones that perpetrate falsehoods.”
As AI-generated imagery becomes more advanced and the code it uses becomes open source, we may be forced to ask the question more often than not: Is it real or is it AI?
The big picture: Bud Lee captures the 1967 Newark riots
The civil unrest that erupted in Newark, New Jersey, over six days in July 1967 has come to be thought of as an uprising rather than a series of riots. The immediate cause was the arrest and beating in custody of a local cab driver, John William Smith, but the sustained outpouring of anger that followed was an expression of lifetimes of ill treatment of the city’s majority Black population at the hands of the police and the courts. At the height of the conflict, the national guard was called in to occupy the streets with tanks and troops. By the time peace was eventually imposed, 26 people were dead and hundreds severely injured.
Bud Lee was a young photographer on his first major assignment with Life magazine. He brought those events to the national conscience, in particular with a cover photograph of a 12-year-old boy, Joey Bass Jr, who was wounded by the round of gunfire that killed another man, Billy Furr, shot in the back by police for looting a six-pack of beer. Lee’s pictures opened up a nationwide debate about police violence. A new book, The War Is Here: Newark 1967, collects those images, many of them unpublished, and reinhabits not only the fear and the violence – but also, as in this image, the defiance of that bloody week in Newark history.
Bud Lee died in 2015. In an introductory essay to the new book, the journalist Chris Campion describes how the photographer always felt strangely implicated in the death of Furr and the shooting of Bass, whom he visited throughout his months of recovery in hospital. He was traumatised by the idea that Furr might have been provoked to steal the case of beer to impress the man with the camera. Lee won a prestigious national “photo story of the year” for his Newark pictures, but he subsequently moved away from frontline news photography into portraiture and teaching.
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The War Is Here: Newark 1967 is published 22 May by Ze Books
From farm to BARN: Bainbridge makerspace promotes art accessibility, eyes expansion
5 tips for phenomenal phone photography
Like most of the population, I take a smartphone with me everywhere I go. This makes its built-in camera an obvious, and most available, option for taking photos quickly and easily.
The smart autofocus and easy point-and-shoot style enables me to capture images even while walking. I can then edit or share the pictures on social media without having to lug my Fujifilm X-S10, along with the lenses, SD cards and batteries I would carry for more dedicated jobs. It’s really easy to use phone editing apps, like Photoshop, Gallery and Snapseed, to name a few – and many of these are free.
• Check out the best camera phones around right now
I think the future for smartphone photography is exciting – particularly how many people are more than satisfied with the results. It has become a widely accessible way to have the thrill of taking photos but getting to the final results far quicker.
Another benefit (especially when on the move) is that taking photos with a phone is more discreet than using a digital camera. In recent years, people all over the world have become used to seeing people using their phones to take photos and don’t pay attention any more. So you can pretty much go about your day without anyone wondering what you are up to.
Here are my top five tips for perfect phone photography…
1) Be mobile
Get out into your local towns or cities and start shooting. Grab yourself a coffee and start to explore the area, looking for potential image opportunities in new spots
that you might not usually venture into. Try not to rush around; a big part of camera phone photography is that it’s easy and enjoyable, and you don’t have to put too
much emphasis on the final images.
2) Shoot in Portrait mode
Most of the time, but not always, I’ll use the Portrait mode setting. Designed for taking portraits, this option adds a little more blur to the background and foreground, therefore drawing the viewer’s attention to the areas that matter.
Is phone photography REAL photography? A day in the life of pro shooter Mike Kus
3) Adjust the exposure
When you offer up your phone to the scene, it will hazard a pretty good guess at the required overall exposure. If you’d like a little more control, however, just tap on the brightest area. You can also hold your finger on the screen and pull up or down.
4) Zoom in and out
Camera phones have fixed optical lenses, but you can zoom in or out digitally by pinching the screen. Zooming further will usually result in reduced image quality,
so use this functionality sparingly when trying to adjust the composition to your advantage.
5) Edit your images
Snapseed is installed on my phone, so I don’t need to wait until I’m at home to edit. In the basic ‘Tune Image’ tab, I can experiment with brightness, contrast, saturation, ambience and so on. This is usually enough to take an image to the next level.
Check out the best lenses for iPhone and Android phones, be sure to look at the best flip phones & best fold phones, and here’s our reality check – nobody actually needs a 200MP camera phone!
University of the Ozarks professor wins first place in FSRAM Invitational
As visitors contemplate this year’s annual invitational art show at the Fort Smith Regional Art Museum, there’s more to see than ever in the 75 years of FSRAM’s existence. Submissions from 77 artists include photography, stained glass, acrylic, watercolor, oils, woodcut, pastel, fiber, rayon, and a medium new to FSRAM this year — chocolate sealed in resin and titled “Think Like a Man” by Zuleyma Payan.
