TAOS — Photographer Raul Velderrain spent two months planning the perfect shot: He would spend two hours climbing to a spot in the Rio Grande Gorge and then 20 seconds with an open shutter to capture the Milky Way as it loomed behind the gorge bridge.
What he didn’t plan to do was spend 28 hours in jail on a count of trespassing.
“It was worth it,” Velderrain told The Taos News, “because I got to see my vision and my art come to fruition.”
One of the biggest challenges of landscape photography is having the camera see what your eyes do. Our eyes are much more sensitive to certain changes in light than cameras. We see subtle variations in tone that the camera just doesn’t pick up.
This means environments can appear a little more drab than we’d hoped. In this video, Mark Denney walks us through how we can get some of that atmosphere back. It’s a great technique, and you don’t even have to leave Lightroom.
We’ve all been somewhere before where everything just seemed to come together. The light, the shadows, the clouds, the separation of depth from the haze. We bring up our camera to get a shot and it just completely loses the haze.
Trying to bring that back in the edit can be a challenge. It used to be extremely difficult to do in the early days of digital photography. Photoshop was kind of primitive, and Lightroom didn’t even exist yet. Aside from the lack of tools, the biggest issue back then was that the same techniques didn’t always work on all images.
That is still true today, as Mark mentions early on in the video. Every scene is different, and every scene is lit differently. So, he shows several different techniques for adding a hazy atmosphere back into your photos. And being done in Lightroom, the edits are completely non-destructive.
On a side note, I do find it quite amusing to see tutorials like this while also seeing tutorials about reducing the haze and how to make your colours pop.
On a sunny evening at the Governor’s mansion in Santa Fe, Paloma Rivera from the Pueblo of Pojoaque danced for a crowd of people in fabulous outfits of silk and leather, feathers and rhinestones.
Designers, models and fashion-lovers gathered to launch the first Native Fashion Week, the organizers say the first of its kind in the United States.
“Why Native Fashion Week? Because the time is way overdue!” said organizer Amber-Dawn Bear Robe (Siksika Nation), an art historian and curator, to cheers.
She said the fashion industry has long profited from Indigenous designs, but now it is time for Native designers to take the lead.
Alice Fordham
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KUNM
“Indigenous designers and artists are the original fashion makers of this land,” Bear Robe said in an interview. “It just hasn’t been framed as that, it’s been framed as a curiosity or anthropological object.”
The Southwestern Association for Indian Arts, which also runs Santa Fe’s Indian Market, is organizing the week’s events.
“To see the amount of attention and love given to our communities right now is heartwarming and long overdue,” said SWAIA executive director Jamie Schulze (Northern Cheyenne/Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate).
As more people appreciate Native art and Native history, Bear Robe said there is more interest in designers like the ones who will be participating in a symposium at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture on Friday, May 3 and in runway shows at the Convention Center over the weekend. Tickets are available through the SWAIA website.
Other events during the week include a fundraiser at SITE Santa Fe at 6.30pm on May 4, including art, dance, sound and fashion. The money raised will go to support Indigenous artists through the 4KINSHIP Indigenous Futures Fund.
Despite all the growing attention and appreciation, Bear Robe said raising funding and sponsorship for an event like this is still very challenging.
“There is no shortage of Indigenous designers, of talent, of models, of the people who are interested,” she said. “But I need a Native Oprah.”
That is, someone with the resources as well as the will to champion Native creatives.
That challenge won’t go away soon, but this is a night of celebration. Participating designer Himikalas Pamela Baker (Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw/Tlingit/Haida/Squamish) called the fashion week a great recognition of Indigenous art.
Alice Fordham
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KUNM
“Every piece tells a story,” she said. “I think every designer you talk to, their pieces all tell a story of their history.”
Model Richard Smallboy (Maskwacis Cree Nation) said art and Indigeneity are intertwined.
“I think that inherently as Indigenous people, we express ourselves in a creative and artistic way and that this has always been a part of who we are,” he said.
He finds it natural for that art to modernize and change.
“The adaptive nature of how we are celebrating our fashion and our art is something that we have genetically within our blood, within our nations, within our practices, within our culture,” he said.
