Photographer Miles Astray recently submitted a photo featuring a flamingo with its head bending into its body to a contest for AI-generated images, sponsored by 1839 Awards. The judges awarded him third place in the AI category and he also won the first place People’s Vote Award for the AI category. However, once the contest discovered that Astray hadn’t actually used AI but, rather, took the photo himself, he was disqualified. 

Art News states that the judges were from the New York Times, Chritie’s (the auction house), and the publishing house Phaidon. Art News also explains that Astray purposefully submitted his photograph to the AI category in order to “advocate for human-made pictures.” They quote Astray:

“With AI-generated content remodelling the digital landscape rapidly while sparking an ever-fiercer debate about its implications for the future of content and the creators behind it – from creatives like artists, journalists, and graphic designers to employees in all sorts of industries – I entered this actual photo into the AI category of 1839 Awards to prove that human-made content has not lost its relevance, that Mother Nature and her human interpreters can still beat the machine, and that creativity and emotion are more than just a string of digits.”

Even though Astray’s winning photograph was deleted from the 1839 Awards website, the artist “treated the debacle as a victory.” Again, Art News quotes Astray:

“I hope that winning over both the jury and the public with this picture, was not just a win for me but for many creatives out there. I won’t go as far as to say that it’s a win for Mother Nature herself because I think she’s got bigger things on her plate; who knows, maybe AI can help her with that, by computing climate change models and the likes.”

On the contest website, the 1839 Awards provides this overview of its history and mission:

Named after the year the medium was first made widely available to the public, 1839 Awards offers a series of competitions honoring the most remarkable photographers using photography as an art form.

To see Miles Astray’s winning photograph, entitled “F L A M I N G O N E,” along with more of his work, check out his website or Instagram.

This past week I joined my friend Jo and her husband at an art exhibition by painter Jordan Perkins. The exhibition was held at the Grizzly Gallery and Winery in West Kelowna.

Jordan Perkins’ exhibition was titled Wild Palette, an exhilarating art collection that showcases the united spirit of wildlife, people and animals through a bold, colourful, painterly lens. The exhibition of mostly large (60″ by 48″) paintings also featured the Okanagan Symphony Brass Trio, and of course the fully-stocked Grizzly Winery had all sorts of vintages for attendees. I’ll also mention that there were children, and many people brought their dogs.

I had decided that the exhibition would be a fun place to take pictures. I wasn’t sure if the exhibition was going to be held in a small or large space, so I brought both my little Fuji and my compact Canon G1X.

Both cameras have crop frame sensors, giving me plenty of image data size for when I want to manipulate my photograph with my computer’s software programs. As readers know, the hobby of photography is more than just a point-and-shoot memory maker.

The Grizzly Winery/Gallery was a large open space with plenty of light coming in. And there were exhibition lights on all the large, colourful paintings, making it a fun place to make pictures.

While I wandered looking at Jordan’s paintings I noticed two official photographers (they had name tags). One seemed to be making videos and the other was shooting stills. He would take pictures of people and then check them on an iPhone strapped to his wrist. Gosh, technology is so wonderful. I am sure he was numbering his photographs for people who might want to order them in the future. There was an announcement that anyone could get photographs with the artist.

I doubt anyone even noticed me. Perfect! I could move through the crowd taking photos. There was (with a couple of dark area exceptions) enough light for me to shoot my camera at ISO 800. Depending on what I was photographing I would move my camera mode between Manual and Shutter Priority. Although I would quickly check my camera’s LCD, some people were a moving blur because I was shooting at too slow a shutter speed. I did change lenses a couple times, and the 55-200mm lets in less light than the 18-55mm.

Regarding using ISO 800. There was a time when using an ISO higher than 400 was a concern because of image noise (longtime camera users will remember the exaggerated film grain they got with ISO400 and above). Modern camera sensors can easily give photographers clean, noiseless images at 800, and depending on the sensor size much higher. I really don’t worry about noise and prefer leaving my camera set at ISO 800 unless I am out shooting on a sunny day. Oh, and for those who aren’t intending on making a large print or sending their finished photograph to a magazine, noise should not be a concern anyway.

Now that I have been going through my images I have cropped some and turned some to black-and-white. It is hard to think of some of those wildly colourful paintings as B&W, but sometimes B&W just works.

An event like Jordon Perkins’ Wild Palette is another fun opportunity for photographers to use their cameras. It’s great to enjoy an exhibition of excellent art while walking around with a glass of fine red wine, pointing my camera in a crowded room full of people without anyone bothering us.

Stay safe and be creative. These are my thoughts for this week. Contact me at www.enmanscamera.com or emcam@telus.net.

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**Related Links:**
– Apple
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Wildlife photography is considered one of the most challenging genres, and not only from a technical point of view. It requires extensive research, long-distance travel to often remote locations and the ability to adapt to different climates. Most importantly, it also means taking adequate safety measures when tracking down the animals. Capturing the essence of wild creatures and conveying a sense of proximity in one frame is what brings exotic wildlife close to the viewer. This can only be achieved by respecting your subjects’ boundaries. However, this brings many challenges. 

Argentinian wildlife photographer Guadalupe Laiz aims to strike a balance between getting close enough to shoot the perfect image and respect for the animals she works with. She spends months in the wildlife’s natural habitat, allowing her to take the viewer on an intense journey that not only reveals the beauty of these animals but also the difficulties they face in the modern world.

Guadalupe is passionate about educating and partnering with non-profit organisations. While raising awareness, she worked on her latest publication ‘Among the Living’. In our conversation, she explains how she unexpectedly became an award-winning wildlife photographer and, more recently, an educator.

Interview

Guadalupe Laiz

Guadalupe Laiz is an internationally recognised artist, photographer, and explorer. Originally from Argentina, Guadalupe moved to the United States at the age of 20 to pursue her passion for photography. Guadalupe captured the beauty and character of Iceland’s unique native horses, a project that led to her first book Horses of Iceland, published in 2019. The book has been exhibited globally and has received widespread acclaim. In her latest book, Among the Living: Where You Belong, Guadalupe showcases some of Africa’s rarest and most impressive wildlife.

KAPURTHALA: Pushpa Gujral Science City marked the celebration of Nature Photography Day with an engaging exhibition titled “Nature Photography” aimed at raising awareness and inspiring the public about the wonders of nature. The exhibition featured captivating photographs by the renowned nature photographer, Sh. Gurpartap Singh from Mohali.

Further, Director Science City, Speaking on the occasion highlighted that Nature Photography Day, celebrated annually on 15th June, aims to promote the joy of nature photography and demonstrate how such images contribute to conservation efforts and wildlife protection both locally and globally.

Dr. Grover remarked, “Photography is a beautiful art that brings us closer to the world we live in. The view through the camera’s lens helps us appreciate and capture the essence of our surroundings every day. He encouraged everyone to use this occasion as an opportunity to explore the natural world more closely and to preserve those moments through photography.

This celebration underscored the vital role that photography plays in fostering a deeper connection with nature and supporting conservation initiatives

In 2015 alone, 1,146 people died during or after interactions with law enforcement officials in the US. In 2016, the death toll was 1,093, per “The Counted,” a special report and database from The Guardian. (In both years, the vast majority of deaths were classified as due to gunshot wounds, with a small number of fatalities after individuals were tased, struck by police vehicles or reported as a “death in custody.”)

For the photographer Diana Matar, seeking to memorialize these deaths — and the liminal spaces they represent — proved overwhelming to consider as a project, even at a smaller scale. She narrowed her focus down to four states; California and Texas, because they had the highest number of such incidents across the country, and Oklahoma and New Mexico because they consistently had some of the highest rates per capita.

“I thought I could photograph (where) every encounter happened in two years in these four states, and it just became impossible,” Matar told CNN. “Timewise, financially, in every possible way.”

Still, over some three years of photography trips, Matar drove hundreds of miles across the four states, visiting more than 300 locations where people had died during (or following) an encounter with law enforcement officers in 2015 and 2016. 110 of these images are published now in the monograph “My America;” quiet, monochromatic images of everyday sites like parking lots, rural roads and suburban sidewalks.

Patches of grass at an empty roadside mark the place where 40-year-old Terence Crutcher was killed by a police officer in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 2016. In Addison, Texas, birds perching on telephone wires overlook the site where 16-year-old Jose Cruz was murdered by an off duty police officer that same year. (In 2018, the officer was sentenced to 10 years in prison, having been found guilty of murder and aggravated assault.) Two chairs on a sunny sidewalk in Los Angeles, California, indicate where 37-year-old Norma Guzman, 37, was shot and killed by police officers in 2015.

Beside each image in the book are three brief lines of biographical information: the name of the deceased, their birth and death years, and the site’s location.

“I was really adamant about how the photographs would be presented. I just wanted it to be a name,” said Matar, who consulted family and victims’ support groups. “I didn’t want the last thing to be thought of about these people was the way they died. These were people, with lives.”

“There are so many images, and so many images of violence that we kind of turn off,” Matar added continued of today’s era of social media and smartphones. “I think we need space to digest, and I wanted to approach this in a way that was quite quiet. I wanted images that did not reinforce the violence. I wanted images that you can look at, and imagine this very banal place as the last place someone has been.”

An internationally acclaimed photographer and distinguished artist at Columbia University’s Barnard College in New York City, Matar’s relationship with documenting landscapes and violence is rooted in her own personal experiences. In 1990, her father-in-law was forcibly disappeared by the Gadhafi regime in Libya, and was never seen by his family again. “I was familiar with this idea of the legacy of state-sponsored violence and what it does intimately to a family… but also really looking at it through photography and what these landscapes hold,” Matar said.

Matar was born in California but has lived abroad for nearly two decades. Her photographic practice has taken her to locations across Libya, North Africa, Italy and Ukraine looking at the intersections of landscape and memory, in particular examining spaces where people had been killed or forcibly interned. But before beginning her work on “My America,” she had never turned her lens on the US.

In 2014 and 2015, the police killings of Black men and boys including Eric Garner in New York City, 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio and Walter Scott in Charleston, South Carolina, captured on camera and shared on social media, sparked national protests and a racial reckoning. Matar felt compelled to return to America. “I had worked on issues around landscapes of violence and state violence for many years outside of my home country, and I wanted to start researching what was happening from that point of view (in the US).”

Using a range of sources — including victim databases, media coverage, district attorney documents and police reports — Matar made her work during six lengthy road trips. She would watch videos or local news coverage of what happened at the location right before photographing the site in question. “That really was very emotionally affecting,” she said.

“Every time I got out of the car, I was very aware I was not just taking a photograph of a landscape or of a building. I was photographing something that held the last moments of someone’s life — unless they had been taken to hospital, it was the place where these deaths happened. It made me think about my country, and made me question so many things. ”

Of all the sites Matar visited, she said only seven had a memorial of some kind, whether that was a mural, flowers, memorabilia or photos. In a way, though, the photographs and the information placed alongside them in “My America” have a memorial-like quality of their own; Matar emphasizes this was a conscious decision in the book’s design. “I wanted a lot of white space in there, because I wanted the viewer to sit and think, and not just move on quickly,” she said.

While the biographical information next to each photograph is sparse, Matar researched and wrote a longer passage of text dedicated to each person’s life, and death, which is included in the book’s final pages.

She describes her research of the wider issues relating to law-enforcement related deaths as “even more affecting” than the process of making the photographs. This is exemplified in a series of pages in the middle of the book which outline key statistics related to such deaths, those impacted and factors involved — like that the number of people who die in encounters with police each year (around 1,000) has not changed in the nine years since Matar started researching the project in 2015.

“When you see all the things that go into why this is occurring — the lack of mental health beds, the lack of arms training, the racial injustice — there’s so many things that come together in this particular challenge,” Matar reflected. “This book is placing this type of violence in a continuum of a lot of violence in the history of the country.”

“I don’t have an illusion that this work is going to change anything, she continued. “What I do think, though, is that point a camera at something, researching something, writing about something — all these things require great attention. And that attention is saying that this matters, this really matters.”

We love a good photography competition at Digital Camera World, and the chance to bring some of the most new stunning images to you.

The German Society for Nature Photography (GDT) recently revealed the winners of their annual members-only photo competition.

The prestigious competition received over 8,000 entries across seven categories: Birds, Mammals, Other Animals, Plants and Fungi, Landscapes, Nature’s Studio, and the special category – All Things Flow.

Feeding Humpback whales, Namibian antlions, and ethereal woodlands were among the winners. 

Overall winner

The eerie and beautiful trees in the hardwood riparian forest of the Mittel Elbe Biosphere Reserve in Germany.

Photographer Dieter Damschen who captured the image said:

“Winter is my favorite time of year, and one of my favored motifs is the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve Elbe River Landscape. I often visit this hardwood riparian forest in the foreland of the dyke to take photographs at fixed points with lines of sight that reveal carefully selected compositions.

“Although I claim to know this location very well and sometimes get the feeling that I have seen and photographed everything here many times, I am regularly surprised by how different a supposedly familiar place can appear.”

After several years of extremely low water levels, a highly anticipated winter flood came to the forest. The water combined with the snowfall resulted in contrasting lines, creating a graphic yet fleeting effect.

Damschen used Fujifilm GFX100S,  and GF100-200mm f/5.6 @150 mm, with an exposure of ISO 100, f/16, 6.5 sec.

Nature’s Studio winner 

Shaped twice by nature, these windswept trees live in the stark dunes of the German barrier island Baltrum. 

Landscapes winner

Birches in autumn was taken by Felix Wesch in his favorite woodland. 

Plants and Fungi winner

Arrowhead plants thrive in small river Groote Aa, which flows past the outskirts of the photographers village in the Netherlands. 

Other Animals winner

These delicate insects look incredibly fairy-like, and are tricky to find in the wild. 

Mammals winner

Ugandan Humpback whales spend the summer months in the Atlantic feeding grounds, hunting krill to build up their fat reserves for the winter months. These whales can be seen using a technique known as bubble netting, whereby the whales surround the krill, and push them further together by releasing huge bubbles of air. 

Birds winner

A Gentoo penguin surfing effortlessly through the waves on Sea Lion Island, in the Falklands Island. Gentoos are the fastest swimmers among penguins. 

The best of the runner ups:

Morlak’s guide in Madikwe, South Afriday reportedly said, “But cheetahs don’t kill zebras,” upon seeing this extraordinary sight. But needs must when you have three hungry mouths to feed. 

Snakes use their tongues to detect smells. Photographer Kai Kolodziej managed to capture this incredible behaviour in this stunning image. 

The Eurasian beaver was once widespread throughout the continent, but was hunted to near extinction at the turn of the 20th century for its fur and castoreum, a substance used in perfume and some food stuffs. 

Check out the best wide-angle lenses for shooting nature and wildlife. We’ve also put together our list of the best cameras for wildlife photography. 

Why not take a look at our guide to the best trail cameras while you’re at it?

Luciano Ratto is a photographer in the Seattle area. He recently published a book of photos, “Taste the Floor,” which documents the Seattle DIY music scene. Ratto’s work will be featured at Bumbershoot this year in IF YOU KNOW YOU KNOW, a group photography exhibit at the festival.

Seattle Refined: How long have you been creating? What mediums do you work with?
Ratto: I’ve been creating and photographing for around eight years but started to take it seriously around five years ago when I was 21 years old. My main practice is photography, but I also dabble in clothing and design here and there.

Can you tell us about your artistic process and how the different stages work into it?
My practice revolves around investigation. Being an inner investigator of myself, trying to understand what I want to say and do as an artist (as presented in “The Nightmare of Reason” and “Conversations with Ghosts”). Or external investigations such as subculture explorations (as presented in “Taste the Floor” and “Aftertaste”).

I’m a project-based artist, so the process usually starts with me trying to figure out what is the next project (usually comes quite naturally, and I have a project in my hands without even thinking about it). After I have a vague idea of what I want to say and what is it about, I think about the name of it and a sound that represents the aesthetic I want to create. Music is extremely important in my process, and every project contains a very specific song that was used as the “aesthetic blueprint.”

After setting the framework for the project, I then stack photos for a certain period that I usually set myself beforehand. It can vary depending on the project, it could be one month to two years of piling photos.

By setting an aesthetic blueprint early on in the project conception, the rest will be just following the set frame.

Tell us about where your inspiration for your art comes from.
My art inspiration is the forever stubbornness of myself to believe my practice will answer questions about who I am and why I am who I am. My inspiration is the answer to my question, lingering around the corner of my negative.

Do you have a specific “beat” you like best – nature, food, profiles, etc.?
One of the biggest reasons I moved to the PNW was nature. Mother Nature is the final designer and we will always learn by observing it.

Do you have one piece of art that means more to you or is extremely special to you?
Diane Arbus’ “Mom Holding Crying Child, New Jersey,” 1967, is probably my favorite photograph. I have a ripped page from one of her books with this photo on top of my mirror, and every day before walking out, I stare at the child. It always reminds me of the true potency of a photo.

What experiences in your life have affected your art the most?
Grief.

If we want to see more of your work, where should we go to find it?
Currently only presently online on Instagram (@luciano_ratto) but you can also check some of my work in the Bumbershoot Festival at IYKYK gallery.

What is next for you? Anything you’re working on right now that you’re really excited about?
I’m currently working on a follow-up book to “Taste the Floor” (TTF is a self-published zine documenting the Seattle underground music scene) and currently selecting the prints to be presented in a gallery show at Bumbershoot! The show is called IYKYK, it will feature different pockets of underground music cultures all around the PNW from bluegrass to crust punk! It should be a blast and a really interesting window to look at!

Lastly, how do you take your coffee? (We ask everyone!)
16 oz. three-shot caramel latte.

About ‘Artist of the Week’: This city is packed with artists we love to feature weekly on Seattle Refined! If you have a local artist in mind that you would like to see featured, let us know at hello@seattlerefined.com. And if you’re wondering just what constitutes art, that’s the beauty of it; it’s up to you! See all of our past Artists of the Week in our dedicated section.