The avant-garde artist and gallerist ELT Mesens was crucial to the spread and promotion of surrealism in 1920s Paris and Brussels – and later in 1930s London. A friend of André Breton and Man Ray and “soulmate” of René Magritte, he was instrumental in (briefly) bringing together the rival Belgian and French artists in the group. The occasion for this was a special June 1929 edition of the Belgian magazine Variétés, for which Mesens was art director. The magazine featured essays by Sigmund Freud (on jokes) and Louis Aragon and illustrations and images by Magritte and Max Ernst.

It was thought that much of the original archive of Variétés had been lost, but 30 years ago, in the archive of the Flemish daily newspaper Vooruit, a large cache of vintage prints from the magazine was discovered, miraculously preserved. The magazine had featured images by all the pioneers of surrealist photography including Man Ray, Berenice Abbott and László Moholy-Nagy.

An exhibition of images from the Variétés archive is currently on display in Amsterdam. It includes this 1929 print by the French photographer Maurice Tabard, who had worked as a fashion photographer in New York in the early 1920s before returning home. Tabard was, for a time, Man Ray’s assistant and helped to pioneer many of the techniques that became associated with the movement – solarisation, multiple exposures, the burning of negatives, all of which were designed to bring chance and free association into photographic practice.

This picture references the surprises and accident of collage. The shadow hand, here reaching for the daily paper had, by then, become a signature of surrealist imagery, often appearing to operate autonomously, detached from brain and intent, a strange and uncanny creative force with a revolutionary mind of its own.

• Variétés. Photography and the Avant-Garde is at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam until 22 October

Volunteers helping Project Soldier say that they would not be alive, or have a free country, if it wasn’t for the service of these veterans

John Fielder photographed Colorado’s beauty for 50 years.

John Fielder, Colorado’s preeminent nature photographer, has died at the age of 73.

His daughter, Kay Fielder, confirmed his death to multiple media outlets. She said he died on Friday after a struggle with pancreatic cancer.

Gov. Jared Polis released a statement mourning the photographer.

“I am saddened by the loss of John Fielder, who captured Colorado’s iconic beauty during his 50 years as a nature photographer. His unique talent and work allowed him to showcase our state to millions across the world and he will be dearly missed,.

“My condolences to his family and friends. I hope that we can all follow his example to appreciate and preserve our outdoor lands.”

Fielder may best known for his “Colorado 1870-2000” photograph book series that he made in partnership with History Colorado. In that series, Fielder matched photos taken by William Henry Jackson more than a century earlier.

In January, Fielder donated his Colorado photography to History Colorado. The museum will be home for a collection of more than 7,000 photos distilled from 200,000 he made since 1973, and which are now available to the public for personal and commercial use.

Just last month — on July 22 — the History Colorado Center in downtown Denver unveiled a new exhibit called “REVEALED: John Fielder’s Favorite Place.”

On his website, Fielder said he first visited Colorado at the age of 14 during a school field trip from North Carolina:

“In all my life, I have not forgotten my first sight of the Rockies rising up before me over the plains. I was simply smitten by this wall of snow-capped peaks above a treeless plain. And the word C-O-L-O-R-A-D-O, it was the most poetic name for a place I had ever heard. I realized at that moment that someone or something had guided me to this place, and that I belonged here for the rest of my life.”

His awards included the Sierra Club’s Ansel Adams Award in 1993 and the Aldo Leopold Foundation’s Achievement Award in 2011. He was the first individual to be awarded the latter award.

Fielder leaves behind two daughters Ashley and Katy, and six grandchildren. John lost his wife Gigi to Alzheimer’s disease in 2005 and their son J.T. in 2006.

Fielder requested donations be made to Sierra Club, Conservation Colorado, Colorado Open Lands and Save the Colorado.

The family will conduct a private memorial service at a later date.

A basic understanding of the physics of light can help us to achieve the best possible photographic results. Here are some very simplified explanations of how what we learned in school science lessons can affect what we do with our cameras.

There’s a lot more to light than meets the eye. Okay, so that’s an awful pun, but it is both metaphorically and literally correct. Not only is it a more complex subject than we need to know in our everyday lives, there is a lot more light hitting you than your retina can convert into nerve impulses that are sent to the brain. There is less light than that landing on your camera sensor that gets turned into an electronic signal and transmitted to the camera’s processor.

In other words, our eyes can’t see all the light there is, much of it is invisible to us, but they see more than our cameras.

Get to Grips With Your Camera’s Dynamic Range

On a bright day, you will see most of the details in both the bright highlights of the sky and the deep shadows under objects on the ground simultaneously. Your camera, with a single exposure, can’t see as wide a range of tones. However, modern sensor technology has improved dramatically and, as you can see from the image above, they have the ability to see both highlights and details in darker areas. It wasn’t that many years ago when I would have had to bracket the exposures of that scene and then combine them to create a high dynamic range (HDR) image to be able to see the top of the lighthouse when pointing the camera directly at the sunrise.

As we get older, our eyes gradually lose our capability to see as wide a range of tones as we did in our youth. Nevertheless, we should see between 18 and 20 stops of tonal range between black and white. Top-of-the-range cameras are between 12 and 15 stops, although a recent sensor developed this year claims 24.6 stops. Don’t worry too much about that, though; your camera will still take fabulous pictures.

The Importance of Our Visible Spectrum

What we call visible light is a tiny fraction of the total electromagnetic spectrum that we and our cameras can see. I find it quite incredible that we can differentiate the different colors of the spectrum that occur in a range that’s only 320 nanometers wide. In other words, we can tell apart all seven colors that comprise white light plus all their combinations.

We are fortunate that most of the photons that hit the earth fall into the bandwidth from 380 to 700 nanometers. It is a happy accident resulting from our planet being in the Goldilocks zone, exactly the right distance from the right type of star. Plus our atmosphere has an ozone layer that filters out the ultraviolet light that would cause us sunburn and worse. If we were bathed in more energetic particles, such as UV or gamma radiation, we would not last long before we were cooked. At the other extreme, if the wavelengths reaching us were a bit longer, we would need much bigger eyes and would have difficulties threading a needle.

How Bending Light Affects Our Images

As the earth spins and dawn arrives, we see the sun appear before it’s physically above the horizon. That’s because, like passing through a prism or raindrops, the light bends when it hits the atmosphere. Consequently, that bending of light, called refraction, means we can see below the horizon. It’s the same effect as when you put a spoon into a glass of water and see it bend.

White light is made up of seven different colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. We see these in a rainbow and on the cover of The Dark Side of the Moon album by Pink Floyd.

Each color has a different wavelength and therefore travels at a different speed. As a result, the colors bend at different angles, which is what makes the white light split into its component parts. Red light slows the least and is therefore diffracted less. At the other end of the spectrum, violet light is slowed down the most and is refracted more. This process of splitting the light is called dispersion. The more refraction there is, the greater the dispersion. Unsurprisingly, diamonds have the highest refractive index, which is why they sparkle with colors.

That splitting of light is usually unwanted in photography. The last thing we need from a lens is it making rainbows. When it happens, we see it as color fringing or chromatic aberration around high-contrast edges. Cheap lenses are prone to this fault. A perfect lens would have no aberrations and all the different wavelengths would converge on a single point on the sensor. To get close to this, lens manufacturers have multiple glass elements within the lens that help bring the different wavelengths together. Modern lens technology is getting constantly better and contemporary professional lenses exhibit no visible aberrations.

Diffraction also occurs as light hits an edge. Imagine ripples on water hitting an obstruction, they will bend around it. The same applies to light.

Why We Usually Avoid Very Small Apertures

Stand outside on a bright day and look at your shadow. You will see that the outer edges of it are not quite as dark as the middle. That lighter edge is caused by the light bending around you. Incidentally, that dark part of the shadow is called the umbra, and the lighter edge is the penumbra. The farther from the light source you are, the larger the umbra is in proportion to the penumbra, and the sharper your shadow becomes. That’s something to consider when using flash and studio lights.

With photography, this light-bending effect happens when the photons bounce off and bend around the edges of the aperture blades. The smaller the aperture, the more pronounced that bouncing and bending becomes. That’s because the proportion of diffracted light to un-diffracted light is high at small apertures.

This is why photographers usually avoid the smallest apertures because the increased proportion of diffracted light causes images to be less sharp.

The Reason the Sky Is Blue

Not only does this bouncing – properly called scattering – occur when light hits boundaries, but also when light encounters other particles. Because blue has shorter wavelengths, it is scattered more easily than red, which is why we see the sky during the day as blue.

As we look toward the horizon, the sky can appear whiter. That is because there is more atmosphere for the blue light to be scattered repeatedly, which removes the blueness. Furthermore, looking obliquely through the atmosphere the extra particles scatter other colors too, plus there’s also the light reflected from the planet’s surface affecting it. 

All these factors result in the different wavelengths being mixed again and producing white light. The exception can be over the sea, where the blue of the water is reflected up into the atmosphere turning the low sky blue again.

Using a CPL Filter

The scattered light in the sky is polarised. That means that the blue light waves travel in a single direction, as opposed to randomly in all directions. This polarized movement is perpendicular to the light source. Therefore, if you fit a circular polarizing (CPL) filter to your lens, you can cut out much of the light in the sky at 90 degrees to the Sun, making the sky appear darker.

Polarizing filters are great for taking away reflections off the water’s surface, allowing you to see more clearly what lies beneath because the reflection is polarized. You can also remove glare from, say, damp, autumnal leaves, allowing their colors to become richer.

The Physics Behind Those Glorious Sunsets

As the sun gets low in the sky, the sunlight must pass through a lot more atmosphere before it reaches you. At low levels, it is filled with dust and water vapor. This scatters the blue light even more and only the reds and oranges get through to our eyes, hence glorious sunsets with warm colors.

Warm Colors Are Not Warm At All

When I say warm colors, I mean psychologically warm. We think of reds, oranges, and yellows being warm colors and blues being cold. However, in physics, it’s the other way around. Think of a blacksmith heating a piece of metal. At first, it glows red, then yellow. As it gets hotter it turns a blueish white. A welder’s gas torch is exceptionally hot and can melt steel. It burns blue.

There’s a Reason Why Your Camera Used Red, Green, and Blue

There is a question that I am often asked. Why do photographic sensors and computer screens use red, green, and blue to reproduce colors instead of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet? That is the big difference between science and engineering. It is possible to achieve white by combining just those three colors, which, from an engineering perspective, is the simplest way to achieve the desired result. Finding a means of combining all seven colors of the spectrum on a camera sensor or computer monitor would be complex, and expensive.

However, like everything in photography, there is a compromise. The camera and your computer screen using the three primary colors of red, green, and blue cannot reproduce anything like the range of colors available to our eyes in the real world.

Even that isn’t as simple as it first seems. The range of colors differs depending on the device. Firstly, there is the virtual image, which is the most precise version. It’s what your camera records when shooting raw and what your editing software understands your image to be. Then there is the rather more limited version of colors that appear on your computer monitor, or your camera if you are shooting jpegs. Different again is the version that you are able to print.

What we really want is for these three different ranges to be the same. To do that, we use color management. With color management, we are defining maximum and minimum values for red, green, and blue. Whole books have been written about this, and there’s far too much information to include in this article. However, it is important to know that you should keep your printer, screen, and camera (if you are not shooting raw), set to the same color space.

The most commonly used of these color spaces is sRGB. However, Adobe RGB is another common profile that has more colors available to it and it was the standard for high-end digital printing. ProPhoto RGB has an even wider profile and provides almost all the colors possible for most printers. However, things have changed and the printers I use produce color profiles for each type of print and paper. Those give the highest possible color accuracy.

For most photographers, it is enough to remember to use a color space that is no bigger than the gamut available to your devices.

The Difference Between Additive and Subtractive Light

When we mix projected light, red, green, and blue are primary colours. Combined they produce secondary colors: magenta, cyan, and yellow. This is additive light, so mixing red and green produces yellow. Mixing different proportions of these colored lights will give us the range of colors that the printer can produce.

In comparison, when we use printer inks, they remove or subtract colors from white light. The inks absorb some light and reflect others. When mixing the ink colors of magenta, cyan, and yellow in different proportions with black, we can get another, different range of colors. In color management, that range is known as a gamut.

Using a single color space, we ensure we are only using those colors where the two gamuts overlap. If we tried to view or print colors that were outside the capabilities of your screens or printers, we would get some odd results.

Color Is Not Entirely Under Your Control

On a related subject, the screen in front of you will have control buttons to change, at the bare minimum, the contrast and brightness. So will everyone else’s. Calibrating your screen is an important step to ensuring your prints’ colors and tones match what you print. Of course, when you share an image online, most other people won’t have calibrated screens. Consequently, your images may appear brighter or darker, with more or less saturation, and different contrast than it should. There is nothing you can do about that. If you are printing photos and want accurate results, or if you are sharing them with other photographers who are likely to have calibrated their screens, then calibrating your screen is essential.

Please, Go and Read More

This article is, of course, just scratching the surface of these topics and there is plenty to be learned under each topic I’ve covered. Search the other articles here at Fstoppers, there’s a wealth of knowledge in the 33,000+ articles, some of which look more deeply at the topics I have briefly covered here.

Photographer Chris Porsz hopes this photo will help him finally find a mystery woman and her leaping dog.

“In March 2019 I was sat in the Union Square, New York dog run when I spotted a lady with a pink bag on her hand (to keep her hand clean) throwing a ball to her dog which was sat down facing her. The dog then launched itself and flipped in mid-air to face me and snap,” he said.

“As you can see the lady with her hand on her head was as surprised as me and I think she is saying phew.

“I have searched in vain via the NY media to find the owner so that I can send her a copy.”

Calling all nature enthusiasts and photography aficionados. The Tennessee Wildlife Federation is thrilled to announce the launch of its ninth annual Wildlife and Landscape Photo Contest. Last year’s contest winners included a photograph from Unicoi County.

Photographed by Lauren Lyon and titled “Loving the Leaf Litter,” the image of a salamander became the featured photo for October in the federation’s 2023 calendar.

Lyon, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, has a vested interest in conserving native species in the Blue Ridge Mountains. You can see more of her photography on the Instagram account @AppRedPanda.

In order to celebrate the beauty of Tennessee’s wildlife, landscapes and natural wonders, photographers of all skill levels are invited to submit their captivating shots for a chance to win exciting prizes and be featured in the federation’s 2024 calendar.

Photos of Tennessee’s incredible wildlife and wild places can be submitted at tnwf.org/photo-contest until Aug. 31.

Whether you’re an amateur capturing the mesmerizing hues of a sunrise over the Smoky Mountains or a seasoned pro with wildlife masterpieces, this contest welcomes all nature-inspired imagery.

Photographers can submit one photo with a $5 suggested donation, up to five photos for $10 and up to 20 photos with a $20 donation. This donation helps support the federation’s mission to lead the conservation, sound management and wise use of Tennessee’s wildlife and great outdoors.

“We are incredibly excited to host this photography contest each year because it’s another way to join together with other passionate people to highlight our state’s rich biodiversity and natural splendor,” said Kendall McCarter, chief development officer for the Tennessee Wildlife Federation. “We hope this contest provides a platform for photographers to show their love for nature and wildlife, inspire a greater appreciation of conservation and foster a deeper connection with the great outdoors.”

A panel of judges will select the best photos to be featured in the federation’s 2024 calendar and across the federation’s digital platforms. Winners will also receive a variety of prizes including Patagonia gift cards up to $250, federation apparel and more.

The deadline to submit photos is 11:59 p.m. CT Aug. 31. Voting for the People’s Choice winner will open to the public on Sept. 8.

For contest guidelines, submission details and more information, visit tnwf.org/photo-contest.

The Tennessee Wildlife Federation leads the conservation, sound management and wise use of the state’s great outdoors. Since 1946, the federation has spearheaded the development of the state’s wildlife policy, advanced landmark legislation on air and water quality and other conservation initiatives, helped restore numerous species and introduced thousands of kids to the great outdoors. To learn more, visit tnwf.org.

Now in its fourth year, the Comedy Pet Awards, a photography contest looking to capture the playful, the bizarre, and the hilarious character we all know resides within our fur babies, just concluded in London.

The winner this year was Michel Zoghzoghi, who travels the world shooting pictures of big and fearsome cats among other wildlife. He took first prize when he captured his playful rescues in action, with the rambunctious Max ambushing the timid Alex.

As the winner of the top prize, Michel received £500 cash, a fantastic camera bag
from ThinkTank, and a beautiful bespoke trophy.

“This is still a very young competition in the whole scheme of things, but within a few short years we are already receiving some of the most uplifting, life-affirming hilarious images of pets in the world!” stated Tom Sullam, Co-founder of the Comedy Pet Awards.

“I couldn’t be more excited to share these with you all. Pets have played a fundamental role during the COVID years, and to be able to laugh out loud with these loveable creatures is the reason this competition exists.”

“In March 2019 I was sitting in the Union Square New York dog run when I spotted a lady with a pink bag on her hand (to keep her hand clean) throwing a ball to her dog which was sat down facing her. The dog then launched itself and flipped in mid-air to face me and snap!”

“Karin and her two dogs, don’t they look the same?

“The avenger of the poor is back, but this time as a dog and not on a horse, but in a car! The obligatory black mask is a must, of course.”

Uplift Anyone’s Day With These Cute And Hilarious Photographs… 

John Fielder, a prolific and prominent nature photographer who has lived in Summit County since 2006, died Friday, Aug. 11, after a prolonged struggle with pancreatic cancer, according to an email from his daughter, Katy Fielder. He was 73 years old.

During a career that spanned 40 years, Fielder worked to protect Colorado’s ranches, open space and wildlife. Over 50 books have been published depicting his Colorado photography. In January 2023, he donated his Colorado photography to History Colorado. The museum is the home of a collection of more than 7,000 photos distilled from 200,000 he made since 1973, and which are now available to the public for personal and commercial use.

“I have never felt that I ‘owned’ my photographs, only that I was borrowing these places to visit and record, and that I would give them back someday,” Fielder wrote in a column for the Summit Daily News talking about his donation.

His photography influenced people and legislation and earned him recognition including the 1993 Sierra Club Ansel Adams Award, in 2011 the Aldo Leopold Foundation’s first Achievement Award ever given to an individual, and in 2017 Colorado Mountain College presented him an Honorary Degree in Sustainability Studies.

He leaves behind two daughters Ashley and Katy, and six grandchildren. John lost his wife Gigi to Alzheimer’s disease in 2005 and their son J.T. to suicide in 2006.

In an effort to continue his spirit and legacy of helping nonprofit environmental organizations for the promotion and funding of their respective land-use protection initiatives, Fielder requested donations be made to Sierra Club, Conservation Colorado, Colorado Open Lands and Save the Colorado.

The family will conduct a private memorial service at a later date.