The eagerly awaited 212 Photography Istanbul event is set to captivate audiences once again from Oct. 5 to 15. In its sixth year, the festival promises to go beyond photography, encompassing a diverse range of disciplines and welcomes attendees to explore various routes across Istanbul.

Having connected with over 70,000 visitors in 2022, the “Festival of the City,” 212 Photography Istanbul will spread across nearly 20 distinct venues. It not only features exhibitions but also incorporates workshops, discussions, film screenings, concerts, and performances, showcasing a myriad of artistic expressions.

The solo exhibitions of artists such as Danielle van Zadelhoff, Eva Szombat, Rob MacInnis, Floriane de Lassee, and Mous Lamrabat will be displayed at Yapı Kredi Bomontiada.

At the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University Tophane-i Amire Culture and Art Center, Nick Brandt will shed light on the world of animals and nature through his conservation-focused photography. Meanwhile, the enchanting ambiance of the Church of Saint Benoit will host an exhibition, which draws inspiration from French traveler and writer Jules Verne’s rich imagination, inviting visitors on a journey underground, into space, and underwater, prompting existential contemplation.

Taksim Sanat will present another exhibition, a collection of archival photographs capturing pioneering women of the era and women in Istanbul’s social life, specially prepared for the 100th anniversary of the Republic.

Institut Français will honor the memory of Jean-Luc Godard, a pioneer of the French New Wave cinema, with film screenings. The exhibition will also feature photographs taken by Raymond Cauchetier and Georges Pierre, documenting Godard’s films.

The Kadıköy’s Müze Gazhane will feature thematic exhibitions such as “From Reality to Photo-Reality,” exploring the transformation of photography through new technologies, and “Where Wild Roses Grow,” which delves into our relationship with nature through a dark and mysterious forest. Additionally, “Recorded Memory” will provide nostalgic concert memories from Türkiye’s booming music industry since the 1990s.

Yeldeğirmeni Sanat will showcase the striking works of Wolfe von Lenkiewicz, who reinterprets prominent artworks from art history with the aid of artificial intelligence (AI).

Among the supporters for this year’s event are Paribu, Jotun, Anadolu Hayat Emeklilik, and HP, alongside the Consulate General of Netherlands in Istanbul, the Norwegian Embassy, Institut Français Türkiye, and the Istanbul Liszt Institute Hungarian Cultural Center.

In its commitment to transforming public spaces into art encounters, 212 Photography Istanbul will present a unique approach, featuring a floating selection of photographs on the sea at Moda Pier and augmented reality technology bringing monumental sculptures to life in public squares.

Simultaneously, the event will showcase exhibitions by Büyükdere 35, Anna Laudel, ArtOn, Fotoğrafevi, and Noks Art Space galleries, complementing the festival’s diverse program.

Founded in 2018, the festival aims to create a sustainable tradition of art and culture, fostering creativity and artistic expression in Istanbul.

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A collection of aerial photographs taken during the Second World War have been opened to the public for the first time.

The black and white images were taken by the US Army Air Forces (USAAF) Photographic Reconnaissance units, stationed at bases across England in 1943 and 1944, after the US joined the war in December 1941.

The 3,600 photographs offer a birds-eye view of the country as it changed during the Second World War, including bomb damage to towns and cities such as Old Trafford football stadium in Greater Manchester.

Damage to the main stand of the football ground can be seen in the photo, after it was hit in a bombing raid in March 1941. The home of Manchester United was not used again for football until 1949.

They also capture ancient monuments surrounded by anti-tank defences in West Sussex, such as Cissbury Ring Iron Age hillfort in Worthing where ditches and concrete cubes can be seen laid out to impede an enemy advance.

Meanwhile, there is low-level photograph showing part of a US Army camp in Wiltshire which shows firing ranges in the foreground while troops play a game of baseball in a recreation field in the top left of the image.

A photograph of Worthing Pier in West Sussex, taken in April 1944, also shows part of its decking removed to make an enemy landing more difficult, while an image taken on Christmas Eve in 1943 at Stonehenge in Wiltshire shows the markings highlighting the location of a First World War aerodrome and camp.

The collection, which capture a variety of locations and an “astonishing level of detail”, have been made available to the public for the first time in an online, searchable map on the Historic England Archive.

Duncan Wilson, chief executive of Historic England, said: “Our USAAF Collection records changes taking place in England as a result of the Second World War, as well as capturing fascinating incidental detail, like American troops playing baseball.

“Our collection of USAAF wartime photographs were taken in England by the pilots and aircraft of squadrons that provided intelligence for the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany. This came at a cost, with many pilots killed in the line of duty.

“We are making these images available to the public for the first time online, giving people access to this remarkable collection of historic photographs. They help to highlight the vital role aerial reconnaissance played in the Second World War.”

BETHLEHEM, PA – On April 5, the board of trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation gave the green light to award Guggenheim Fellowships to a remarkable group of individuals, including Northampton Community College (NCC) art faculty member, Sasha Phyars-Burgess. These fellowships are highly sought after, with over 2,500 talented artists applying for them. The Guggenheim Fellowship program aims to provide these exceptional individuals with blocks of time in which they can work with as much creative freedom as possible. The foundation has been supporting talented artists in the performing arts since 1925, and they take great pride in doing so.

Phyars-Burgess, a photographer raised in Bethlehem PA, had her first photography class at Freedom High School, followed by a class at NCC a few years after. She is a highly educated individual with a bachelor’s in photography from Brad College and a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from Cornell University. Her passion for capturing moments in time was originally discovered through her curiosity towards new experiences, as she was seeking an escape from the routines of everyday life.

As a first-generation artist, Phyars-Burgess was determined to build a successful career on an artistic path. Burgess explained that her drive for success stemmed from her own self-accountability, allowing her to push harder and dive deeper into her creative journey when in moments of doubt.

Phyars-Burgess focuses her photography on exploring the African diaspora and the experiences of African Americans across the globe. She skillfully captures moments that aim to resonate with those who share her perspective, while also striving to spark conversations among those who have never or will never be able to explore life through the same lens.

“Photography gives me another way to speak that isn’t written or verbal. Some things are hard to describe through words, and photography has the ability to evoke emotion in different ways than words do. It’s an excuse to learn about something that can speak in different languages, usually more emotional,” she says.

About Northampton Community College

With an enduring commitment to the regional community it serves and a focus on student success, Northampton Community College has developed a reputation as an institution of extraordinary distinction, earning accolades at the state and national levels for innovative programs, outstanding faculty and impressive student achievements. It counts among its successful alumni a four-time Pulitzer Prize winner and an Academy Award winning director as well as a host of CEOs, presidents, and leaders of business and industry. Today, Northampton Community College has locations in Bethlehem, Southside Bethlehem, and Monroe County, serving 30,000 students each year from 53 counties, 42 countries and 25 states. For more information, or to apply, please visit www.northampton.edu. Follow NCC’s President on Twitter @NCCPresDaveRuth, and follow the College on TikTok @NorthamptonCCand on Instagram @NorthamptonCommCollege. Like us on Facebook at Northampton Community College.

The digital darkroom isn’t the natural habitat of keen wildlife photographers.

We’d rather be in the fresh air than in front of a computer screen, handling a camera rather than a keyboard.

Yet post-processing is a vital part of the creative process, whether you’re an old-school advocate of wildlife photography as documentary, or prefer a more interpretative, expressive approach to your nature images.

Clever editing can really make your subject sing while retaining the essential truthfulness of what you observed.  And with a little more artistic licence you can deepen the drama and magnify the mood, to make your work stand out from the crowd.

We believe in getting our images right in camera, rather than relying on post-processing to salvage mistakes. It saves time, preserves authenticity, and maximises image quality. For us, the mantra ‘less is more’ is the key to editing, and we share a pet-hate of over-processed images.

Excessive saturation, over-sharpening, unnatural colours; these all are great ways to kill an image, to make nature unnatural.  Our post-processing is predominantly about image correction and subtle enhancement, our goal to achieve the vision we had at the point of capture.

We use Lightroom Classic for the bulk of our post-processing, Photoshop for dust-spotting and for some more sophisticated work with layers when required.

Every photographer has their own post-processing workflow and we’re not claiming ours is best, just explaining what works for us. Post-processing is part science, part art.  There’s always room to freestyle, to experiment and have fun.

Import and edit: the first cut is the deepest

Fresh from a shoot and eager to start work on those special shots you hope you’ve captured, it’s tempting to dive straight in, cherry pick a few strong ones, and start processing. But accidents happen, so before we do any image manipulation, making back-ups is a vital first step.

Our uncut RAW files are copied to two separate devices before we import them to Lightroom: one set to the PC where they will be processed, and a back-up to an external hard drive.  

When importing files into Lightroom we always select the option in File Handling to build 1:1 previews. This takes a little more time initially, but means we then have the highest quality previews available for decision-making. 

Once imported, we’ll rename the folder in Navigator (right click on it > Rename) to something that means something to us (‘Zimanga game drive 1’, for example). If we’ve had a productive shoot and have a lot of images in the folder, we’ll often create sub-folders (right click > Create Folders Inside…), perhaps for different species, name these folders accordingly, and drag in the relevant images from the master folder. 

We find it’s easier to then choose keepers and delete stuff when comparing like with like.

Now it’s time to sort the wheat from the chaff.  We’ll first go through a folder, in the Library module, with large thumbnails, deleting any obvious no-hopers (Backspace > Delete from disk).

These are images that are fundamentally and irreversibly flawed, technically or aesthetically – out-of-focus, badly exposed, animals blinking or with rubbish expressions or awkward poses, etc. There are usually lots of these!

Then on a second pass we’ll spend more time comparing and selecting from similars, looking for the small differences that can make or break an image, such as pricked ears, alert expressions or a dynamic body or wing shape.  

Some photographers like to use ratings to subdivide their keepers, for example on a scale of 1 to 5, but we’re more binary in our selection – an image is either good enough or it’s not. 

It’s important at this stage to remember that even the best images can look flat and uninteresting as RAW files.  You need to see the potential in the image, something that gets easier with experience.

Now we’re down to a manageable selection it’s time to start processing.  We’ll probably still have a few similars, making a final decision on which one to keep once we’ve ‘Lightroomed’ them.

And we’ll probably have some keepers we’ll delete after living with them for a few days – it’s not always easy being objective about an image you had high hopes for, but didn’t quite work.

Developing the image

One of the beauties of Lightroom is that you can flit back and forward between sliders in the Develop module, the order in which you do things doesn’t affect the outcome.  We generally stick to the following routine, but we’ll often jump back and forwards, tweaking sliders that we’ve already adjusted. 

Bear in mind not all images require a boots-and-all approach. We’ll often apply only a fraction of the tools at our disposal to an individual shot where that’s all it needs.

Lens profile

Before we start with sliders we go to Lens Corrections, click the Profiles tab, and make sure that Remove Chromatic Aberration and Enable Profile Corrections are ticked.  This is especially important with images shot with wide angle lenses, where colour fringing is often seen in the corners, for example, on tree branches.

Profile correction will largely remove barrel and pincushion distortion.  Occasionally we’ll deselect it if we like the distorted effect of an ultra-wide close-up, say for a looming elephant bull. 

Lens Correction also deals with unwanted vignetting on wide angle shots, but if you like the vignetting you can click on the manual tab and add it to taste.

Cropping

We like to crop early in the process, so the histogram information is relevant to the final image content. A very bright sky, for example, will strongly affect the histogram curve, so if we plan to crop it out, it’s best to do so first.

With high megapixel sensors it’s possible to crop heavily and still have a useable image, especially if it’s only going to be used on a web page or social media.   It all depends on the end use, for example, photo agencies and competitions demand restraint: reducing an original image by more than 20 per cent is likely to be unacceptable. 

If you want a high-quality image, heavy cropping is no substitute for not getting close enough to your subject, or not having e big enough lens. We crop lightly, just to finesse the composition.  Make sure you leave enough space around your subject, so it doesn’t look squashed into the frame, and if it’s moving has space to move into.  

Not every animal portrait looks good filling the frame: with a tiny subject such as a fairy wren, for example, it’s often better to keep it quite small in the frame, to emphasise its diminutive size. 

Look out for part two next week, where we delve further into our workflow.

About the authors: Ann & Steve Toon are a UK-based, husband and wife team of award-winning, professional photographers with a specialist interest in the wildlife and wild places of southern Africa where they spend several months each year photographing and running photographic safaris.

Their work is published in a wide range of magazines and national newspapers, both in the UK and abroad, and they are represented by several leading photographic libraries. They’ve also written three books, two on wildlife photography and one on rhinos. You can see more of their work on their website at toonwildlife.com.

Take a look at Yavari’s award-winning imagery which stunningly captures the essence of Black women’s beauty.

Iranian-born photographer Forough Yavari has been crowned the overall winner of the International Portrait Photographer of the Year competition. 

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Her triumph stems from her breathtaking series titled ‘Salvation’, a creation inspired by the poetry of Langston Hughes, which she read at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The collection features portraits of Black women, enhanced by Yavari’s incorporation of meticulously hand-crafted 24K gold pigment onto the printed images. 

“For this project I’m inspired by Langston Hughes’ poems. He was a poet, playwrite and social activist and there are two main elements in his work which I’m inspired by – dance and blues, which refer to freedom and loneliness. So this work is based on those two elements, dance and music, which resonates because I have it in my own heritage as well,” Yavari told the National Portrait Gallery. 

This marks the second time Yavari has topped the competition. 

Who is Forough Yavari?

Yavari, born in Iran during the tumultuous Iranian Revolution, quickly found a passion for art from a young age. 

She went on to pursue painting in university, where she serendipitously discovered her love for photography while modelling for a photography student.

In 2011, she moved to Australia, where she built her photography business and became established as fine art portrait and fashion photographer, winning several national and international awards along the way. 

Her work is particularly  influenced by her personal experience as a woman from a middle eastern country. 

Yavari’s deep-seated concern for women’s issues manifested in the creation of two distinct series: ‘Revision of Portraits’ and ‘Eternal Icons.’ 

These series were showcased in exhibitions held in both Iran and Australia.

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A collection of aerial photographs taken during the Second World War have been opened to the public for the first time.

The black and white images were taken by the US Army Air Forces (USAAF) Photographic Reconnaissance units, stationed at bases across England in 1943 and 1944, after the US joined the war in December 1941.

The 3,600 photographs offer a birds-eye view of the country as it changed during the Second World War, including bomb damage to towns and cities such as Old Trafford football stadium in Greater Manchester.

Damage to the main stand of the football ground can be seen in the photo, after it was hit in a bombing raid in March 1941. The home of Manchester United was not used again for football until 1949.

They also capture ancient monuments surrounded by anti-tank defences in West Sussex, such as Cissbury Ring Iron Age hillfort in Worthing where ditches and concrete cubes can be seen laid out to impede an enemy advance.

Meanwhile, there is low-level photograph showing part of a US Army camp in Wiltshire which shows firing ranges in the foreground while troops play a game of baseball in a recreation field in the top left of the image.

A photograph of Worthing Pier in West Sussex, taken in April 1944, also shows part of its decking removed to make an enemy landing more difficult, while an image taken on Christmas Eve in 1943 at Stonehenge in Wiltshire shows the markings highlighting the location of a First World War aerodrome and camp.

The collection, which capture a variety of locations and an “astonishing level of detail”, have been made available to the public for the first time in an online, searchable map on the Historic England Archive.

Duncan Wilson, chief executive of Historic England, said: “Our USAAF Collection records changes taking place in England as a result of the Second World War, as well as capturing fascinating incidental detail, like American troops playing baseball.

“Our collection of USAAF wartime photographs were taken in England by the pilots and aircraft of squadrons that provided intelligence for the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany. This came at a cost, with many pilots killed in the line of duty.

“We are making these images available to the public for the first time online, giving people access to this remarkable collection of historic photographs. They help to highlight the vital role aerial reconnaissance played in the Second World War.”

Fine art portrait photographer David Teran traveled the world with his 1969 Hasselblad 500C/M camera to capture beautiful black and white portraits of some of the most talented and powerful ballerinas. Teran has launched a Kickstarter campaign to celebrate the multi-year project to release a special book, Hasselblad Ballet.

“Over the past five years, I’ve taken from Hasselblad camera from 1969 around the world and photographed some of the most extraordinary ballerinas in 19 different countries using only one roll of Ilford black and white film,” Teran says.

“Drawing inspiration from the ballet world, David has meticulously curated an enchanting and sublime collection that showcases the grace and elegance of ballerinas from various countries around the world. David has crafted a visual masterpiece that pays homage to the artistry of both photography and ballet. Just as a ballet performance captures the essence of movement, David’s photography captures the heart and soul of each ballerina, creating a captivating narrative that unfolds with every image,” the Kickstarter campaign explains.

Teran describes his project as showcasing ballerinas in a quirky and whimsical way, bringing the talented dancers outside their typical studio surroundings and placing them in beautiful locations worldwide.

“Creating Hasselblad Ballet has been a true labor of love. This project has allowed me to combine my passion for photography (and food!) and the beauty of ballet in a way that is both unconventional and unique,” says David Teran.

The book features over 100 ballerinas photographed in 53 cities across 19 diverse countries. Teran worked with famed ballerinas such as Isabella Boylston from the American Ballet Theater and dancers from the Paris Opera Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, The Royal Danish Ballet, Dutch National Ballet, and many others.

Teran worked alongside Sofiane Sylve, the renowned artistic director of Ballet San Antonio, Teran’s hometown.

There is also an interesting juxtaposition between the speed and agility of ballerinas and Teran’s choice of camera. Unlike modern digital cameras, the Hasselblad 500C/M is a relatively slow camera that requires careful consideration for every shot.

The Hasselblad 500C/M, like other 500 series cameras, has played an important role in photographic and human history. Hasselblad 500C cameras have been into space. NASA astronaut Walter Schirra took a 500C aboard the Mercury rocket in 1962, making the Hasselblad 500C the first camera to “properly document space,” per Hasselblad.

Teran joins an illustrious group of photographers who have created art with Hasselblad 500-series cameras. Ansel Adams, Sid Avery, and Gered Mankowitz are just a few who have used 500 cameras to capture landscapes and portraits.

Teran’s all-or-nothing Kickstarter campaign is essentially a pre-sale for Hasselblad Ballet, with early bird pledging options for the book starting at $75.

A Limited-Edition Box Set option for $250 includes a signed copy of the book inside a linen cloth clamshell box. It also includes a handmade gelatin silver contact sheet. Each one-of-a-kind sheet has Teran’s darkroom markings, offering purchasers a look at the analog photographic process.

Additional backing options include digital phone backgrounds, a Hasselblad Ballet t-shirt, and limited-edition prints. All backing options and complete campaign details are available on Kickstarter.

If Hasselblad Ballet reaches its $33,400 campaign target, the book will begin shipping in May 2024. As of writing, the campaign, which started today, has earned just over $4,000 in funding. The campaign ends on September 20, 2023.

Disclaimer: Make sure you do your own research into any crowdfunding project you’re considering backing. While we aim to only share legitimate and trustworthy campaigns, there’s always a real chance that you can lose your money when backing any crowdfunded project.

Image credits: All images © David Teran. Additional images from “Hasselblad Ballet” are available on Teran’s website.